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5 


THE  ORDEAL  OF 
MARK  TWAIN 


BY 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 

ACJTHOR  or  "LETTERS  AND  LEADERSHIP,"  BTC. 


"Think  it  over,  dear  B —  /    A  man's  gifts  are 
not  a  property:  they  are  a  duty." 

— IBSEN'S  Letter* 


NEW  YORK 
E.  P.  BUTTON  &  COMPANY 

681  FIFTH  AVENUE 


COPYBIGHT,    1920, 
B.  P.   BUTTON  A  COMPANY 


All  Rightt  Reserved 


Firit  printing April,  1SSO 

Second  printing . .  .September,  1920 


Printed  la  the  United  States  of  America 


TO 
E.  S.  B. 


CONTENTS 

ftMB 

I.  INTRODUCTORY:  MARK  TWAIN'S  DESPAIR     .     .  1 

II.    THE  CANDIDATE  FOR  LIFB 26 

III.  THE  GILDED  AGE 51 

IV.  IN  THE  CRUCIBLE 73 

V.    THE  CANDIDATE  FOR  GENTILITY 100 

VI.    EVERYBODY'S  NEIGHBOR 128 

VII.    THE  PLAYBOY  IN  LETTERS 148 

VIII.    THOSE  EXTRAORDINARY  TWINS 178 

IX.  MARK  TWAIN'S  HUMOR  .     .     .^  .     .     .     .     .  198 

X.    LET  SOMEBODY  ELSE  BEGIN 221 

XI.  MUSTERED  OUT    .                                              ,  246 


THE  ORDEAL  OF  MARK  TWAIN 


THE  ORDEAL  OF 
MARK  TWAIN 

CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTORY :   MARK  TWAIN'S  DESPAIR 

"What  a  man  sees  in  the  human  race  is  merely  himself  in  the 
deep  and  honest  privacy  of  his  own  heart.  Byron  despised  the 
race  because  he*~despised  himself.  I  feel  as  Byron  did,  and  for 
the  same  reason." — Marginal  note  in  one  of  Mark  Twain's  booTcs, 

TO  .tjiose  who  are  interested  in  American  life  and 
letters  there  has  been  no  question  of  greater  signifi- 
cance, during  the  last  few  years,  than  the  pessimism  of 
Mark  Twain.  During  the  last  few  years,  I  say,  for  his 
own  friends  and  contemporaries  were  rather  inclined 
to  make  light  of  his  oft-expressed  belief  that  man  is  the 
meanest  of  the  animals  and  life  a  tragic  mistake. 

For  some  time  before  his  death  Mark  Twain  had 
appeared  before  the  public  in  the  role  less  of  a  laughing 
philosopher  than  of  a  somewhat,  gloomy  prophet  of  mod- 
ern civilization.  But  he  was  old  and  he  had  suffered 
many  misfortunes  and  the  progress  of  society  is  not  a 
matter  for  any  one  to  be  very  jubilant  about:  to  be 
gloomy  about  the  world  is  a  sort  of  prerogative  of  those 
who  have  lived  long  and  thought  much.  The  public 
that  had  grown  old  with  him  could  hardly,  therefore, 
accept  at  its  face  value  a  point  of  view  that  seemed  to 
be  contradicted  by  so  many  of  the  facts  of  Mark  Twain 's 
life  and  character.  Mr.  Howells,  who  knew  him  inti- 


2        The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

mately  for  forty  years,  spoke  only  with  an  affectionate 
derision  of  his  "pose"  regarding  "the  damned  human 
race, ' '  and  we  know  the  opinion  of  his  loyal  biographer, 
Mr.  Paine,  that  he  was  "not  a  pessimist  in  his  heart,  but 
only  by  premeditation."  These  views  were  apparently 
borne  out  by  his  own  testimony.  "My  temperament," 
he  wrote,  shortly  after  the  death  of  his  daughter  Jean, 
"has  never  allowed  my  spirits  to  remain  depressed  long 
at  a  time."  That  he  remained  active  and  buoyant  to 
the  end  was,  in  fact,  for  his  associates,  sufficient  evidence 
that  his  philosophical  despair  was  only  an  anomaly, 
which  had  no  organic  part  in  the  structure  of  his  life. 
Was  it  not  natural  that  they  should  feel  thus  about 
him,  those  contemporaries  of  his,  so  few  of  whom  had 
seen  his  later  writings  and  all  the  tell-tale  private  mem- 
oranda which  Mr.  Paine  has  lately  given  to  the  world? 
What  a  charmed  life  was  Mark  Twain 's,  after  all !  To 
be  able  to  hold  an  immense  nation  in  the  hollow  of  one's 
hand,  to  be  able  to  pour  out  into  millions  of  sympathetic 
ears,  with  calm  confidence,  as  into  the  ears  of  a  faithful 
friend,  all  the  private  griefs  and  intimate  humors  of  a 
lifetime,  to  be  called  "the  King"  by  those  one  loves, 
to  be  so  much  more  than  a  king  in  reality  that  every 
attack  of  gout  one  has  is  "good  for  a  column"  in  the 
newspapers  and  every  phrase  one  utters  girdles  the 
world  in  twenty  minutes,  to  be  addressed  as  "the  Mes- 
siah of  a  genuine  gladness  and  joy  to  the  millions  of 
three  continents" — what  more  could  Tom  Sawyer,  at 
least,  have  wished  than  that?  And  Mark  Twain's  fame 
was  not  merely  one  of  sentiment.  If  the  public  heart 
was  moved  by  everything  that  concerned  him, — an  ill- 
ness in  his  household,  a  new  campaign  against  political 
corruption,  a  change  of  residence,  and  he  was  deluged 
with  letters  extolling  him,  whatever  he  did  or  said,  if  he 
won  the  world's  pity  when  he  got  into  debt  and  the 
world 's  praise  when  he  got  out  of  it,  he  was  no  sort  of 
nine  days'  wonder;  his  country  had  made  him  its  "gen- 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  3 

eral  spokesman,"  he  was  quite  within  his  rights  in 
appointing  himself,  as  he  said,  ' '  ambassador-at-large  of 
the  United  States  of  America."  Since  the  day,  half  a 
century  back,  when  all  official  Washington,  from  the 
Cabinet  down,  had  laughed  over  "The  Innocents 
Abroad"  and  offered  him  his  choice  of  a  dozen  public 
offices  to  the  day  when  the  newspapers  were  freely  pro- 
posing that  he  ought  to  have  the  thanks  of  the  nation  and 
;gested  his  name  for  the  Presidency,  when,  in  his 
person,  the  Speaker  of  the  House,  for  the  first  time  in 
American  history,  gave  up  his  private  chamber  to  a 
lobbyist,  and  private  cars  were  placed  at  his  disposal 
whenever  he  took  a  journey,  and  his  baggage  went  round 
the  world  with  consular  dispensations,  and  his  opinion 
was  as!;ed  on  every  subject  by  everybody,  he  had  been, 
indeed,  a  sort  of  incarnation  of  the  character  and  qual- 
ity of  modern  America.  "Everywhere  he  moved,"  says 
Mr.  Paine,  ' '  a  world  revolved  about  him. ' '  In  London, 
in  Vienna,  his  apartments  were  a  court,  and  traffic  rules 
were  modified  to  let  him  pass  in  the  street.  A  charmed 
life,  surely,  when  we  consider,  in  addition  to  this  public 
ace] aim,  the  tidal  waves  of  wealth  that  flowed  in  upon 
him  again  and  again,  the  intense  happiness  of  his  family 
relations,  and  the  splendid  recognition  of  those  fellow- 
members  of  his  craft  whose  word  to  him  was  final — 
ig,  who  "loved  to  think  of  the  great  and  godlike 
Clemens,"  and  Brauder  Matthews,  who  freely  compared 
him  with  the  greatest  writers  of  history,  and  Bernard 
Shaw,  who  announced  that  America  had  produced  just 
two  geniuses,  Edgar  Allan  Poe  and  Mark  Twain. 
Finally,  there  was  Mr.  Howells,  "the  recognized  critical 

;  of  Last  Resort  in  this  country,"  as  he  called  him. 

'id  not  Mr.  Howells,  like  posterity  itself,  whisper  in 

his  car:  "Your  foundations  are  struck  so  deep  that  you 

sateh  the  sunshine  of  immortal  years,  and  bask  in 

ame  light  as  Cervantes  and  Shakespeare"? 

e  spectators  of  this  drama  could  hardly  have  been 


4        The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

expected  to  take  the  pessimism  of  Mark  Twain  seriously, 
and  all  the  more  because  he  totally  refuted  the  old  and 
popular  notion  that  humorists  are  always  melancholy. 
I  have  already  quoted  the  remark  he  made  about  his 
temperament  in  one  of  the  darkest  moments  of  his  life, 
four  months  before  his  own  death.  It  is  borne  out  by 
all  the  evidence  of  all  his  years.  He  was  certainly  not 
one  of  those  radiant,  sunny,  sky-blue  natures,  those 
June-like  natures  that  sing  out  their  full  joy,  the  day 
long,  under  a  cloudless  heaven.  Far  from  that!  He 
was  an  August  nature,  given  to  sudden  storms  and 
thunder;  his  atmosphere  was  charged  with  electricity. 
But  the  storm-clouds  passed  as  swiftly  as  they  gathered, 
and  the  warm,  bright,  mellow  mood  invariably  returned. 
"What  a  child  he  was,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "always,  to 
the  very  end!"  He  was  indeed  a  child  in  the  buoyancy 
of  his  spirits.  "People  who  always  feel  jolly,  no  matter 
where  they  are  or  what  happens  to  them,  who  have  the 
organ  of  Hope  preposterously  developed,  who  are 
endowed  with  an  uncongealable  sanguine  temperament ! ' ' 
he  writes,  referring  to  himself,  in  1861.  "If  there  is," 
he  adds,  thirteen  years  later,  "one  individual  creature 
on  all  this  footstool  who  is  more  thoroughly  and  uni- 
formly and  unceasingly  happy  than  I  am  I  defy  the 
• .  orld  to  produce  him  and  prove  him. ' '  And  it  seems 
always  to  have  been  so.  Whether  he  is  "revelling"  in 
his  triumphs  on  the  platform  or  indulging  his  "rainbow- 
hued  impulses"  on  paper,  we  see  him  again  and  again, 
as  Mr.  Paine  saw  him  in  Washington  in  1906  when  he 
was  expounding  the  gospel  of  copyright  to  the  members 
of  Congress  assembled,  "happy  and  wonderfully  ex 
cited."  Can  it  surprise  us  then  to  find  him,  in  his 
seventy-fifth  year,  adding  to  the  note  about  his  daugh- 
ter's death:  "Shall  I  ever  be  cheerful  again,  happy 
again?  Yes.  And  soon.  For  I  know  my  tempera- 
ment"? 

And  his  physical  health  was  just  what  one  might 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  5 

expect  from  this,  from  his  immense  vitality.  He  was 
subject  to  bronchial  colds  and  he  had  intermittent 
attacks  of  rheumatism  in  later  years:  otherwise,  his 
health  appears  to  have  been  as  perfect  as  his  energy  was 
inexhaustible.  "I  have  been  sick  i-bed.  several  days, 
for  the  first  time  in  21  years,"  he  writes  in  1875;  from 
all  one  gathers  he  might  have  made  the  same  statement 
twenty-one,  thirty-one  years  later.  Read  his  letters,  at 
fifty,  at  sixty,  at  seventy — during  that  extraordinary 
period,  well  within  the  memory  of  people  who  are  still 
young,  when  he  had  solved  his  financial  difficulties  by 
going  into  bankruptcy  and  went  about,  as  Mr.  Paine 
says,  "like  a  debutante  in  her  first  season," — the  days 
when  people  called  him  "the  Belle  of  New  York":  "By 
half  past  4,"  he  writes  to  his  wife,  "I  had  danced  all 
those  people  down — and  yet  was  not  tired,  merely 
breathless.  I  was  in  bed  at  5  and  asleep  in  ten  minutes. 
Up  at  9  and  presently  at  work  on  this  letter  to  you." 
And  again,  the  next  year,  his  sixtieth  year,  when  he 
had  been  playing  billiards  with  H.  H.  Rogers,  until 
Rogers  looked  at  him  helplessly  and  asked,  "Don't  you 
ever  get  tired?":  "I  was  able  to  say  that  I  had  for- 
gotten what  that  feeling  was  like.  Don't  you  remember 
how  almost  impossible  it  was  for  me  to  tire  myself  at 
the  villa?  Well,  it  is  just  so  in  New  York.  I  go  to 
bed  unfatigued  at  3,  I  get  up  fresh  and  fine  six  hours 
later.  I  believe  I  have  taken  only  one  daylight  nap 
since  I  have  been  here."  Finally,  let  us  take  the  testi- 
mony of  Mr.  Paine,  who  was  with  him  day  in,  day  out, 
during  the  last  five  years  of  his  life  when,  even  at 
seventy -four,  he  was  still  playing  billiards  "9  hours  a 
day  and  10  or  12  on  Sunday":  "In  no  other  human 
being  have  I  ever  seen  such  physical  endurance.  I  was 
comparatively  a  young  man,  and  by  no  means  an 
invalid;  but  many  a  time,  far  in  the  night,  when  I  was 
ready  to  drop  with  exhaustion,  he  was  still  as  fresh 
and  buoyant  and  eager  for  the  game  as  at  the  moment 


6        The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

of  beginning.  He  smoked  and  smoked  continually,  and 
followed  the  endless  track  around  the  billiard-table 
with  the  light  step  of  youth.  At  3  or  4  o'clock  in  the 
morning  he  would  urge  just  one  more  game,  and  would 
taunt  me  for  my  weariness.  I  can  truthfully  testify 
that  never  until  the  last  year  of  his  life  did  he  willingly 
lay  down  the  billiard-cue,  or  show  the  least  suggestion 
of  fatigue." 

Now  this  was  the  Mark  Twain  his  contemporaries,  his 
intimates,  had  ever  in  their  eyes, — this  darling  of  all  the 
gods.  No  wonder  they  were  inclined  to  take  his  view 
of  "the  damned  human  race"  as  rather  a  whimsical 
pose ;  they  would  undoubtedly  have  continued  to  take  it 
so  even  if  they  had  known,  generally  known,  that  he 
had  a  way  of  referring  in  private  to  ' '  God 's  most  ele- 
gant invention"  as  not  only  "damned"  but  also 
"mangy."  He  was  irritable,  but  literary  men  are 
always  supposed  to  be  that;  he  was  old,  and  old  people 
are  often  afflicted  with  doubts  about  the  progress  and 
welfare  of  mankind;  he  had  a  warm  and  tender  heart, 
an  abounding  scorn  of  humbug:  one  did  not  have  to  go 
beyond  these  facts  to  explain  his  contempt  for  "the 
Blessings-of-Civilization  Trust, ' '  with,  its  stock-in-trade, 
"Glass  Beads  and  Theology,"  and  "Maxim  Guns  and 
Hymn-Books,"  and  "Trade  Gin  and  Torches  of  Progress 
and  Enlightenment. ' '  All  his  closest  friends  were  accus- 
tomed to  little  notes  like  this:  "I  have  been  reading  the 
morning  paper.  I  do  it  every  morning,  well  knowing 
that  I  shall  find  in  it  the  usual  depravities  and  base- 
nesses and  hypocricies  and  cruelties  that  make  up  civil- 
ization and  cause  me  to  put  in  the  rest  of  the  day 
pleading  for  the  damnation  of  the  human  race."  Might 
not  any  sensitive  man,  young  or  old,  have  written  that? 

Even  now,  with  all  the  perspective  of  Mark  Twain's 
writings  which  only  a  succeeding  generation  can  really 
have,  it  might  be  possible  to  explain  in  this  objective 
way  the  steady  progress  toward  a  pessimistic  cynicism 


Mark  Twainxs  Despair  7 

which  Mr.  Paine,  at  least,  has  noted  in  his  work.  The 
change  in  tone  between  the  poetry  of  the  first  half  of 
"Life  on  the  Mississippi"  and  the  dull  notation  of  the 
latter  half,  between  the  exuberance  of  "A  Tramp 
Abroad"  and  the  drab  and  weary  journalism  of  "Fol- 
lowing the  Equator,"  with  those  corroding  aphorisms  of 
"Pudd'nhead  Wilson's  New  Calendar,"  that  constant 
running  refrain  of  weariness,  exasperation  and  misery, 
along  the  tops  of  the  chapters,  as  if  he  wanted  to  get 
even  with  the  reader  for  taking  his  text  at  its  face  value 
— all  this  might  be  attributed,  as  Mr.  Paine  attributes  it, 
to  the  burdens  of  debt  and  family  sorrow.  If  he  was  al- 
ways manifesting,  in  word  and  deed,  his  deep  belief  that 
life  is  inevitably  a  process  of  deterioration, — well,  did 
not  James  Whitcomb  Riley  do  the  same  thing?  Was  it 
not,  is  it  not,  a  popular  American  dogma  that  "the  bad- 
dest  children  are  better  than  the  goodest  men  "  ?  A  race 
of  people  who  feel  this  way  could  not  have  thought  there 
was  anything  amiss  with  a  humorist  who  wrote  maxims 
like  these : 

If  you  pick  up  a  starving  dog  and  make  him  prosperous,  he  will 
not  bite  you.  This  is  the  principal  difference  between  °,  dog  and 
a  man. 

It  takes  your  enemy  and  your  friend,  working  together,  to  hurt 
you  to  the  heart:  the  one  to  slander  you  and  the  other  to  get 
the  news  to  you. 

They  could  hardly  have  been  surprised  at  the  bitter, 
yes,  even  the  vindictive,  mockery  of  ' '  The  Man  That  Cor- 
rupted Hadleyburg, ' '  at  Mark  Twain 's  definition  of  man 
as  a  "mere  coffee-mill"  which  is  permitted  neither  "to 
supply  the  coffee  nor  turn  the  crank,"  at  his  recurring 
"plan"  to  exterminate  the  human  race  by  withdrawing 
the  oxygen  from  the  air  for  a  period  of  two  minutes. 

Has  not  the  American  public,  with  its  invincible  habit 
of  "turning  hell's  back-yard  into  a  playground,"  gone 
so  far  even  as  to  discount  "The  Mysterious  Stranger," 


8         The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

that  fearful  picture  of  life  as  a  rigmarole  of  cruel  non- 
sense, a  nightmare  of  Satanic  unrealities,  with  its  frank 
assertion  that  slavery,  hypocrisy  and  cowardice  are  the 
eternal  destiny  of  man?  Professor  Stuart  P.  Sherman, 
who  likes  to  defend  the  views  of  thirty  years  ago  and 
sometimes  seems  to  forget  that  all  traditions  are  not  of 
equal  validity,  says  of  this  book  that  it  "lets  one  into 
a  temperament  and  character  of  more  gravity,  com- 
plexity and  interest  than  the  surfaces  indicated."  But 
having  made  this  discovery,  for  he  is  openly  surprised, 
Professor  Sherman  merely  reveals  in  his  new  and  unex- 
pected Mark  Twain  the  Mark  Twain  most  people  had 
known  before:  "What  Mark  Twain  hated  was  the  brutal 
power  resident  in  monarchies,  aristocracies,  tribal  re- 
ligions and — minorities  bent  on  mischief,  and  making 
a  bludgeon  of  the  malleable  many."  And,  after  all,  he 
says,  "the  wicked  world  visited  by  the  mysterious 
stranger  is  sixteenth  century  Austria — not  these  States. ' ' 
But  is  it  ?  Isn  't  the  village  of  Eselburg  in  reality  Han- 
nibal, Missouri,  all  over  again,  and  are  not  the  boys 
through  whose  eyes  the  story  is  told  simply  reincarna- 
tions of  Huck  Finn  and  Tom  Sawyer,  those  characters 
which,  as  we  know  from  a  hundred  evidences,  haunted 
Mark  Twain's  mind  all  his  life  long?  They  are,  at  any 
rate,  Mark  Twain's  boys,  and  whoever  compares  their 
moral  attitude  with  that  of  the  boys  of  Mark  Twain's 
prime  will  see  how  deeply  the  iron  had  entered  into  his 
soul.  "We  boys  wanted  to  warn  them" — Marget  and 
Ursula,  against  the  danger  that  was  gathering  about 
them — "but  we  backed  down  when  it  came  to  the  pinch, 
being  afraid.  We  found  that  we  were  not  manly  enough 
nor  brave  enough  to  do  a  generous  action  when  there 
was  a  chance  that  it  could  get  us  into  trouble."  What, 
is  this  Mark  Twain  speaking,  the  creator  of  Huck  and 
Tom,  who  gladly  broke  every  law  of  the  tribe  to  protect 
and  rescue  Nigger  Jim?  Mark  Twain's  boys  "not  manly 
enough  nor  brave  enough*  To  do  a  generous  action  when 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  9 

there  was  a  chance  that  it  could  get  them  into  trouble? 
Can  we,  in  the  light  of  this,  continue  to  say  that  Mark 
Twain's  pessimism  was  due  to  anything  so  external  as 
the  hatred  of  tyranny,  and  a  sixteenth  century  Austrian 
tyranny  at  that?  Is  it  not  perfectly  plain  that  that 
deep  contempt  for  man,  the  "coffee-mill,"  a  contempt 
that  has  spread  now  even  to  the  boy-nature  of  which 
Mark  Twain  had  been  the  lifelong  hierophant,  must  have 
had  some  far  more  personal  root,  must  have  sprung 
from  some  far  more  intimate  chagrin?  One  goes  back 
to  the  long  series  of  "Pudd'nhead"  maxims,  not  the 
bitter  ones  now,  but  those  desperate  notes  that  seem  to 
bear  no  relation  to  the  life  even  of  a  sardonic  humorist: 


Pity  is  for  the  living,  envy  is  for  the  dead. 

All  say,  "How  hard  it  is  that  we  have  to  die" — a  strange 
complaint  to  come  from  the  mouths  of  people  who  have  had  to 
live. 

Each  person  is  born  to  one  possession  which  outvalues  all  his 
others— his  last  breath. 

And  that  paragraph  about  the  death  of  his  daughter, 
so  utterly  inconsistent  with  the  temperament  he  ascribes 
to  himself:  "My  life  is  a  bitterness,  but  I  am  content; 
for  she  has  been  enriched  with  the  most  precious  of  all 
gifts — the  gift  that  makes  all  other  gifts  mean  and  poor 
— death.  I  have  never  wanted  any  released  friend  of 
mine  restored  to  life  since  I  reached  manhood.  I  felt 
in  this  way  when  Susy  passed  away ;  and  later  my  wife, 
and  later  Mr.  Rogers."  Two  or  three  constructions, 
to  one  who  knows  Mark  Twain,  might  be  put  upon  that : 
but  at  least  one  of  them  is  that,  not  to  the  writer's 
apprehension,  but  in  the  writer's  experience,  life  has 
been  in  some  special  way  a  vain  affliction. 

Can  we,  then,  accept  any  of  the  usual  explanations  of 
Mark  Twain's  pessimism?  Can  we  attribute  it,  with 
Mr.  Paine,  to  the  burdens  of  debt  under  which  he  labored 
now  and  again,  to  the  recurring  illnesses,  the  death  of 


io      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

those  he  loved?  No,  for  these  things  would  have  modi- 
fied his  temperament,  not  his  point  of  view ;  they  would 
have  saddened  him,  cheeked  his  vitality,  given  birth 
perhaps  to  a  certain  habit  of  brooding,  and  this  they 
did  not  do.  "We  have,  in  addition  to  his  own  testimony, 
the  word  of  Mr.  Paine :  ' '  More  than  any  one  I  ever 
knew,  he  lived  in  the  present."  Of  the  misfortunes  of 
life  he  had  neither  more  nor  less  than  other  men,  and 
they  affected  him  neither  more  nor  less.  To  say  any- 
thing else  would  be  to  contradict  the  whole  record  of  his 
personality. 

No,  it  was  some  deep  malady  of  the  soul  that  afflicted 
Mark  Twain,  a  malady  common  to  many  Americans,  per- 
haps, if  we  are  to  judge  from  that  excessive  interest  in 
therapeutics  which  he  shared  with  so  many  millions  of 
his  fellow-countrymen.  That  is  an  aspect  of  Mark 
Twain's  later  history  which  has  received  too  little  atten- 
tion. "Whether  it  was  copyright  legislation,  the  latest 
invention,  or  a  new  empiric  practice, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine — 
to  approach  this  subject  on  its  broadest  side — "he  rarely 
failed  to  have  a  burning  interest  in  some  anodyne  that 
would  provide  physical  or  mental  easement  for  his 
species. ' '  And  here  again  the  general  leads  to  the  par- 
ticular. "He  had,"  says  Mr.  Howells,  "a  tender  heart 
for  the  whole  generation  of  empirics,  as  well  as  the  newer 
sorts  of  scienticians. "  Mr.  Howells  tells  how,  on  the 
advice  of  some  sage,  he  and  all  his  family  gave  up  their 
spectacles  for  a  time  and  came  near  losing  their  eye- 
sight, thanks  to  the  miracle  that  had  been  worked  in 
their  behalf.  But  that  was  the  least  of  his  divagations. 
There  was  that  momentary  rage  for  the  art  of  "predi- 
cating correlation"  at  Professor  Loisette's  School  of 
Memory.  There  was  Dr.  Kellgren's  osteopathic  method 
that  possessed  his  mind  during  the  year  1900 ;  he  wrote 
long  articles  about  it,  bombarding  his  friends  with  let- 
ters of  appreciation  and  recommendation  of  the  new 
cure-all:  "indeed,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "he  gave  most  of 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  II 

his  thought  to  it."  There  was  Plasmon,  that  "panacea 
for  all  human  ills  which  osteopathy  could  not  reach." 
There  was  Christian  Science  to  which,  in  spite  of  his 
attacks  on  Mrs.  Eddy  and  the  somewhat  equivocal  book 
he  wrote  on  the  subject,  he  was,  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  and 
as  he  frequently  averred  himself,  one  of  the  "  earliest 
converts,"  who  "never  lost  faith  in  its  power."  And 
lastly,  there  was  the  "eclectic  therapeutic  doctrine" 
which  he  himself  put  together  piecemeal  from  all  the 
others,  to  the  final  riddance  of  materia  medica. 

We  have  seen  what  Mark  Twain's  apparent  health 
was.  Can  we  say  that  this  therapeutic  obsession  was  due 
to  the  illnesses  of  his  family,  which  were,  indeed,  unend- 
ing? No  doubt  those  illnesses  provided  a  constant 
stimulus  to  the  obsession — the  "eclectic  therapeutic  doc- 
trine," for  instance,  did,  quite  definitely,  rise  up  out 
of  the  midst  of  them.  But  it  is  plain  that  there  had  to 
be  an  element  of  "soul-cure"  in  these  various  healings 
for  Mark  Twain  to  be  interested'  in  them,  that  what 
interested  him  in  them  was  the  ' '  soul-cure, ' '  the  ' '  mind- 
cure."  Can  he  say  too  much  in  praise  of  Christian 
Science  for  its  "healing  of  the  spirit,"  its  gift  of  "buoy- 
ant spirits,  comfort  of  mind  and  freedom  from  care"? 
In  fact,  unless  I  am  mistaken,  his  interest  in  mental 
healing  began  at  a  time  when  he  and  his  family  alike 
were  free  from  illness.  It  is  in  1886,  when  Mark  Twain 
was  at  the  very  summit  of  his  fame,  when  he  was  the 
most  successful  publisher  in  the  world,  when  he  was  at 
work  on  his  most  ambitious  book,  when  he  was  "fright- 
ened," as  he  said,  at  the  proportions  of  his  prosperity, 
when  his  household  was  aglow  with  happiness  and  well- 
being,  that  his  daughter  Susy  notes  in  her  diary :  ' '  Papa 
has  been  very  nraeh  interested  of  late  in  the  'mind-cure' 
theory."  It  might  be  added  that  he  was  about  at  the 
age  when,  according  to  his  famous  aphorism,  a  man  who 
does  not  become  a  pessimist  knows  too  little  about 
life, 


12      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

In  fact,  the  more  one  scans  the  later  pages  of  Mark 
Twain's  history  the  more  one  is  forced  to  the  conclusion 
that  there  was  something  gravely  amiss  with  his  inner 
life.  There  was  that  frequently  noted  fear  of  solitude, 
that  dread  of  being  alone  with  himself  which  made  him, 
for  example,  beg  for  just  one  more  game  of  billiards  at 
4  o'clock  in  the  morning.  There  were  those  ''daily  self- 
chidings"  that  led  him  to  slay  his  own  conscience  in 
one  of  the  most  ferocious  of  his  humorous  tales.  That 
conscience  of  his — what  was  it?  Why  do  so  many  of 
his  jokes  turn  upon  an  affectation,  let  us  say,  of  moral 
cowardice  in  himself?  How  does  it  happen  that  when 
he  reads  "Romola"  the  only  thing  that  "hits"  him 
"with  force"  is  Tito's  compromise  with  his  conscience?. 
Why  those  continual  fits  of  remorse,  those  fantastic  self- 
accusations  in  which  he  charged  himself,  we  are  told, 
with  having  filled  Mrs.  Clem  ens 's  life  with  privations, 
in  which  he  made  himself  responsible  first  for  the  death 
of  his  younger  brother  and  later  for  that  of  his  daugh- 
ter Susy,  writing  to  his  wife,  according  to  Mr.  Paine, 
that  he  was  "wholly  and  solely  responsible  for  the 
tragedy,  detailing  step  by  step  with  fearful  reality  his 
mistakes  and  weaknesses  which  had  led  to  their  down- 
fall, the  separation  from  Susy,  and  this  final,  incredible 
disaster"?  Was  there  any  reason  why,  humorously  or 
otherwise,  he  should  have  spoken  of  himself  as  a  liar, 
why  he  should  have  said,  in  reply  to  his  own  idea  of 
writing  a  book  about  Tom  Sawyer's  after-life:  "If  I 
went  on  now  and  took  him  into  manhood,  he  would  just 
lie,  like  all  the  one-horse  men  in  literature,  and  the 
reader  would  conceive  a  hearty  contempt  for  him"? 
That  morbid  feeling  of  having  lived  in  sin,  whi^h  made 
him  come  to  think  of  literature  as  primarily,  perhaps, 
the  confession  of  sins — was  there  anything  in  the  moral 
point  of  view  of  his  generation  to  justify  it,  in  this 
greatly-loved  writer,  this  honorable  man  of  business, 
this  zealous  reformer,  this  loyal  friend?  "Be  weak,  be 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  13 

water,  be  characterless,  be  cheaply  persuadable"  was,  he 
said,  the  first  command  the  Deity  ever  issued  to  a  human 
being  on  this  planet,  the  only  command  Adam  would 
never  be  able  to  disobey.  And  he  noted  on  the  margin 
of  one  of  his  books:  "What  a  man  sees  in  the  human 
race  is  merely  himself  in  the  deep  and  honest  privacy  of 
his  own  heart.  Byron  despised  the  race  because  he 
despised  himself.  I  feel  as  Byron  did  and  for  the  same 
reason." 

A  strange  enigma !  ' '  You  observe, ' '  wrote  Mark  Twain 
once,  almost  at  the  beginning  of  his  career,  "that  under 
a  cheerful  exterior  I  have  got  a  spirit  that  is  angry  with 
me  and  gives  me  freely  its  contempt."  That  spirit 
remained  with  him,  grew  in  him,  to  the  last.  The  rest- 
less movement  of  his  life,  those  continual  journeys  to 
Bermuda,  where  "the  deep  peace  and  quiet  of  the 
country  sink  into  one's  body  and  bones  and  give  his 
conscience  a  rest,"  that  consuming. desire  to  write  an 
autobiography  "as  caustic,  fiendish  and  devilish  as  pos- 
sible," which  would  "make  people's  hair  curl"  and  get 
"his  heirs  and  assigns  burnt  alive"  if  they  ventured  to 
print  it  within  a  hundred  years,  the  immense  relief  of 
his  seventieth  birthday,  to  him  "the  scriptural  statute 
of  limitations — you  \ave  served  your  term,  well  or  less 
well,  and  yon  are  .mistered  out" — how  are  we  to  read, 
the  signs  of  all  fns  hidden  tragedy  ?  For  Mark  Twain 
was  right — things  do  not  happen  by  chance,  and  the 
psychological  determinism  of  the  present  day  bears  out 
in  certain  respects  that  other  sort  of  determinism  in^ 
which  he  so  almost  fanatically  believed.  There  is  no 
figure  for  the  human  being  like  the  ship,  he  sometimes 
said.  Well,  was  he  not,  in  the  eyes  of  his  contemporaries, 
just  as  he  proudly,  gratefully  suggested,  in  the  glory  of 
that  last  English  welcome,  the  Begum  of  Bengal,  stateli- 
est of  Indiamcn,  plowing  the  great  seas  under  a  cloud 
of  canvas?  Can  we  call  it  merely  an  irony  of  circum- 
stance that  in  his  own  eyes  he  was  a  bit  of  storm-beaten 


14       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

human  drift,  a  derelict,  washing  about  on  a  forlorn  sea  ? 
*>"*  No,  there  was  a  reason  for  Mark  Twain's  pessimism, 
a  reason  for  that  chagrin,  that  fear  of  solitude,  that 
tortured  conscience,  those  fantastic  self -accusations,  that 
indubitable  self-contempt.  It  is  an  established  fact, 
if  I  am  not  mistaken,  that  these  morbid  feelings  of  sin, 
which  have  no  evident  cause,  are  the  result  of  having 
transgressed  some  inalienable  life-demand  peculiar  to 
one 's  nature.  It  is  as  old  as  Milton  that  there  are  talents 
""which  are  "death  to  hide,"  and  I  suggest  that  Mark 
Twain's  "talent"  was  just  so  hidden.  That  bitterness 
/of  his  was  the  effect  of  a  certain  miscarriage  in  his  crea- 
tive life,  a  balked  personality,  an  arrested  development 
of  which  he  was  himself  almost  wholly  unaware,  but 
which  for  him  destroyed  the  meaning  of  life.  The  spirit 

'of  the  artist  in  him,  like  the  genie  at  last  released  from 
the  bottle,  overspread  in  a  gloomy  vapor  the  mind  it  had 
never  quite  been  able  to  possess. 

X  Does  this  seem  too  rash  a  hypothesis?  It  is,  I  know, 
the  general  impression  that  Mark  Twain  quite  fully 
effectuated  himself  as  a  writer,  Mr.  Howells  called  him 
the  "Lincoln  of  our  literature,"  Professor  William  Lyon 
Phelps  describes  him  as  one  of  the  supreme  novelists  of 
the  world,  Professor  Brander  Matthews  compares  him 
with  Cervantes,  and  Bernard  Shaw  said  to  him  once: 
"I  am  persuaded  that  the  future  historian  of  America 
will  find  your  works  as  indispensable  to  him  as  a  French 
historian  finds  the  political  tracts  of  Voltaire."  These 
were  views  current  in  Mark  Twain's  lifetime,  and  sim- 
ilar views  are  common  enough  to-day.  "Mark  Twain," 
says  Professor  Archibald  Henderson,  "enjoys  the  unique 
distinction  of  exhibiting  a  progressive  develop:  nent,  a 
deepening  and  broadening  of  forces,  a  ripening  o  '  intel- 
lectual and  spiritual  powers  from  the  beginning  o  the 
end."  To  Mr.  John  Macy,  author  of  what  is,  on  the 
whole,  the  most  discerning  book  that  has  been  written  on 
our  literature,  he  is  "  a  powerful,  original  thinker. ' '  And 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  15 

finally,  Mr.  H.  L.  Mencken  says:  "Mark  Twain,  without 
question,  was  a  great  artist.  There  was  in  him  some- 
thing of  that  prodigality  of  imagination,  that  aloof 
engrossment  in  the  human  comedy,  that  penetrating 
cynicism,  which  one  associates  with  the  great  artists  of 
the  Renaissance."  An  imposing  array  of  affirmations, 
surely!  And  yet,  unless  I  am  mistaken,  these  last  few 
years,  during  which  he  has  become  in  a  way  so  much 
more  interesting,  have  witnessed  a  singular  change  in 
Mark  Twain's  reputation.  Vividly  present  he  is  in  the 
public  mind  as  a  great  historic  figure,  as  a  sort  of  arch- 
type  of  the  national  character  during  a  long  epoch.  Will 
he  not  continue  so  to  be  for  many  generations  to  come  ? 
Undoubtedly.  By  whom,  however,  with  the  exception 
of  two  or  three  of  his  books,  is  he  read?  Mr.  Paine,  I 
know,  says  that  "The  Innocents  Abroad"  sells  to  this 
day  in  America  in  larger  quantity  than  any  other  book 
of  travel.  But  a  number  of  explanations  might  be  given 
for  this,  as  for  any  other  mob  phenomenon,  none  of 
which  has  anything  to  do  with  literary  fame  in  the 
proper  sense.  A  great  writer  of  the  past  is  known  by 
the  delight  and  stimulus  which  he  gives  to  mature  spirits 
in  the  present,  and  time,  it  seems  to  me,  tends  to  bear 
out  the  assertion  of  Henry  James  that  Mark  Twain's 
appeal  is  an  appeal  to  rudimentary  minds.  "Huckle- 
berry Finn,"  "Tom  Sawyer,"  a  story  or  two  like  "The 
Man  That  Corrupted  Hadleyburg,"  a  sketch  or  two  like 
"Traveling  with  a  Reformer"  and  a  few  chapters  of 
"Life  on  the  Mississippi," — these,  in  any  case,  can 
already  be -said  to  have  "survived"  all  his  oth?r  work. 
And  are  these  writings,  however  beautiful  and  impor- 
tant, the  final  expressions  of  a  supreme  artistic  genius, 
one  of  the  great  novelists  of  the  world,  a  second  Cer- 
vantes ?  Arnold  Bennett,  I  think,  forecast  the  view  that 
prevails  to-day  when  ho  called  their  author  the  "divine 
amateur"  and  said  of  "Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "Tom 
Sawyer"  that  while  they  are  "episodically  magnificent, 


16      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

as  complete  works  of  art  they  are  of  quite  inferior 
quality." 

So  much  for  what  Mark  Twain  actually  accomplished. 
But  if  he  had  not  been  potentially  a  great  man  could 
he  have  so  impressed,  so  dazzled  almost  every  one  who 
came  into  direct,  personal  contact  with  him?  When  his 
contemporaries  compared  him  with  Swift,  Voltaire,  Cer- 
vantes, they  were  certainly  mistaken;  but  would  they 
have  made  that  mistake  if  they  had  not  recognized  in 
him,  if  not  a  creative  capacity,  at  least  a  creative  force, 
of  the  highest  rank?  Mark  Twain's  unbounded  energy, 
his  prodigal  fertility,  his  large  utterance,  that  "great, 
burly  fancy"  of  his,  as  Mr.  Howells  calls  it,  his  powers 
of  feeling,  the  unique  magnetism  of  his  personality 
were  the  signs  of  an  endowment,  one  cannot  help  think- 
ing, more  extraordinary  than  that  of  any  other  Ameri- 
can writer.  He  seemed  predestined  to  be  one  of  those 
major  spirits,  like  Carlyle,  like  Ibsen  perhaps,  or  per- 
haps like  Pushkin,  who  are  as  if  intended  by  nature  to 
preside  over  the  genius  of  nations  and  give  birth  to 
the  leading  impulses  of  entire  epochs.  ' '  I  thought, ' '  said 
one  of  his  associates  in  earlier  years,  "that  the  noble 
costume  of  the  Albanian  would  have  well  become  him, 
Or  he  might  have  been  a  Goth,  and  worn  the  horned 
bull-pate  helmet  of  Alaric's  warriors,  or  stood  at  the 
prow  of  one  of  the  swift  craft  of  the  vikings."  And  on 
the  other  hand,  hear  what  Mr.  Howells  says:  "Among 
the  half-dozen,  or  half-hundred,  personalities  that  each 
of  us  becomes,  I  should  say  that  Clemens 's  central  and 
final  personality  was  something  exquisite."  That  com- 
bination of  barbaric  force  and  intense  sweetness,  which 
so  many  others  noted  in  him— is  there  not  about  it  some- 
thing portentous,  something  that  suggests  the  true  lord 
of  life  ?  Wherever  he  walked  among  men  he  trailed  with 
him  the  psychic  atmosphere  of  a  planet  as  it  were  all 
his  own.  Gigantic,  titanic  were  the  words  that  came 
to  people's  lips  when  they  tried  to  convey  their  impres- 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  17 

sion  of  him,  and  when  he  died  it  seemed  for  the  moment 
as  if  one  of  the  fixed  stars  had  fallen  in  space. 

This  was  the  force,  this  the  energy  which,  through 
Mark  Twain's  pen,  found  such  inadequate  expression. 
He  was,  as  Arnold  Bennett  says,  a  "divine  amateur"; 
his  appeal  is,  on  the  whole,  what  Henry  James  called  it, 
an  appeal  to  rudimentary  minds.  But  is  not  that  simply 
another  way  of  saying,  in  the  latter  case,  that  his  was 
a  mind  that  had  not  developed,  and  in  the  former,  that 
his  was  a  splendid  genius  which  had  never  found  itself? 

It  is  the  conclusion  borne  out  by  Mark  Twain's  own 
self-estimate.  His  judgments  were,  as  Mr.  Paine  says, 
"always  unsafe":  strictly  speaking,  he  never  knew 
what  to  think  of  himself,  he  was  in  two  minds  all  the 
time.  This,  in  itself  a  sign  of  immaturity,  serves  to 
warn  us  against  his  formal  opinions.  When,  therefore, 
one  appeals  for  evidence  to  Mark  Twain's  estimate  of 
himself  it  is  no  conscious  judgment  of  his  career  one  has 
in  mind  but  a  far  more  trustworthy  judgment,  the 
judgment  of  his  unconscious  self.  This  he  revealed 
unawares  in  all  sorts  of  ways. 

There  were  times  when  he  seemed  to  share  the  com- 
placent confidence  of  so  many  others  in  his  immortal 
fame.  "I  told  Howells,"  he  writes,  in  his  large,  loose, 
easy  way,  "that  this  autobiography  of  mine  would  live 
a  couple  of  thousand  years,  without  any  effort,  and 
would  then  take  a  fresh  start  and  live  the  rest  of  the 
time."  And  Mr.  Paine  says  that  as  early  as  October, 
1900,  he  had  proposed  to  Messrs.  Harper  and  Brothers 
a  contract  for  publishing  his  personal  memoirs  at  the 
expiration  of  one  hundred  years,  letters  covering  the 
details  of  which  were  exchanged  with  his  financial  ad- 
viser, Mr.  Rogers.  A  man  who  could  have  proposed 
this  must  have  felt,  at  moments  anyway,  pretty  secure 
of  posterity,  pretty  confident  of  his  own  greatness.  But 
it  was  only  at  moments.  Mark  Twain  was  a  megalo- 
maniac; only  a  megalomaniac  could  have  advertised,  as 


i8      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

he  did,  for  post-mortem  obituaries  of  himself.  But  does 
that  sort  of  megalomania  express  a  genuine  self-confi- 
dence? Does  it  not  suggest  rather  a  profound,  uneasy 
desire  for  corroboration  ?  Of  this  the  famous  episode  of 
his  Oxford  degree  is  the  most  striking  symbol.  ''Al- 
though I  wouldn't  cross  an  ocean  again  for  the  price  of 
the  ship  that  carried  me,  I  am  glad  to  do  it, ' '  he  wrote, 
"for  an  Oxford  degree."  Many  American  writers  have 
won  that  honor ;  it  is,  in  fact,  almost  a  routine  incident 
in  a  distinguished  career.  In  the  case  of  Mark  Twain 
it  became  a  historic  event :  it  was  for  him,  plainly,  of  an 
exceptional  significance,  and  all  his  love  for  gorgeous 
trappings  could  never  account  for  the  delight  he  had  in 
that  doctor's  gown — "I  would  dress  that  way  all  the 
time,  if  I  dared,"  he  told  Mr.  Paine — which  became  for 
him  a  permanent  robe  of  ceremony.  And  Mark  Twain 
at  seventy-two,  one  of  the  most  celebrated  men  in  the 
world,  could  not  have  cared'  so  much  for  it  if  it  had 
been  a  vindication  merely  in  the  eyes  of  others.  It  must 
have  served  in  some  way  also  to  vindicate  him  in  his. 
own  eyes;  he  seized  upon  it  as  a  sort  of  talisman,  as  a 
reassurance  from  what  he  considered  the  highest  court 
of  culture,  that  he  really  was  one  of  the  elect. 

Yes,  that  naive  passion  for  the  limelight,  for  "walk- 
ing with  kings"  and  hobnobbing  with  job  lots  of  celeb- 
rities, that  "revelling,"  as  Mr.  Paine  calls  it,  "in  the 
universal  tribute" — what  was  its  root  if  not  a  deep  sense 
of  insecurity,  a  desire  for  approval  both  in  his  own  eyes 
and  in  the  eyes  of  all  the  world?  During  those  later 
years  in  New  York,  when  he  had  become  so  much  the 
professional  celebrity,  he  always  timed  his  Sunday  morn- 
ing walks  on  Fifth  Avenue  for  about  the  hour  when  the 
churches  were  out.  Mr.  Paine  tells  how,  on  the  first 
Sunday  morning,  he  thoughtlessly  suggested  that  they 
should  turn  away  at  Fifty-ninth  Street  in  order  to  avoid 
the  throng  and  that  Clemens  quietly  remarked  "I  like 
the  throng."  "So,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "we  rested  in  the 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  19 

Plaza  Hotel  until  the  appointed  hour.  .  .  .  We  left  the 
Plaza  Hotel  and  presently  were  amid  the  throng  of 
outpouring  congregations.  Of  course  he  was  the  object 
on  which  every  passing  eye  turned,  the  presence  to 
which  every  hat  was  lifted.  I  realized  that  this  open 
and  eagerly  paid  homage  of  the  multitude  was  still 
dear  to  him,  not  in  any  small  and  petty  way,  but  as  the 
tribute  of  a  nation."  And  must  not  the  desire  for 
approval  and  cor  rob  oration,  the  sense  of  insecurity,  have 
been  very  deep  in  a  quick-tempered,  satirical  democrat 
like  Mark  Twain,  when  he  permitted  his  associates  to 
call  him,  as  Mr.  Paine  says  they  did,  "the  King"? 
Actual  kings  were  with  him  nothing  less  than  an  obses- 
sion: kings,  empresses,  princes,  archduchesses — what  a 
part  they  play  in  his  biography!  He  is  always  drag- 
ging them  in,  into  his  stories,  into  his  letters,  writing 
about  his  dinners  with  them,  and  his  calls  upon  them, 
and  how  friendly  they  are,  and  what  gorgeous  funerals 
they  have.  And  as  with  kings,  so  also  with  great  men, 
or  men  who  were  considered  great,  or  men  who  were 
merely  notorious.  He  makes  lists  of  those  he  has  known, 
those  he  has  spent  evenings  with — Mark  Twain,  to  whom 
celebrity  was  the  cheapest  thing  going!  Is  there  not  in 
all  this  the  suggestion  of  an  almost  conscious  weakness 
clutching  at  strength,  the  suggestion  of  some  kind  of  "1 
failure  that  sets  a  premium  upon  almost  any  kind  of  / 
success  ? 

Turn  from  the  man  to  the  writer ;  we  see  again  this 
same  desire  for  approval,  for  corroboration.  Mark 
Twain  was  supported  by  the  sentiment  of  the  majority, 
which  was  gospel  to  the  old-fashioned  Westerner;  he 
had  the  golden  opinion  of  Mr.  Howells,  in  his  eyes  the 
arbiter  of  all  the  elegances ;  he  had  virtually  the  freedom 
of  The  Atlantic  Monthly,  and  not  only  its  freedom  but 
a  higher  rate  of  payment  than  any  other  Atlantic  con- 
tributor. Could  any  American  man  of  letters  have  had 
more  reason  to  think  well  of  himself?  Observe  what 


20      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

he  thought.  "I  haven't  as  good  an  opinion  of  my  work 
as  you  hold  of  it,"  he  writes  to  Mr.  Howells  in  1887, 
"but  I've  always  done  what  I  could  to  secure  and 
enlarge  my  good  opinion  of  it.  I've  always  said  to 
myself,  'Everybody  reads  it  and  that's  something — it 
surely  isn't  pernicious,  or  the  most  acceptable  people 
would  get  pretty  tired  of  it.'  And  when  a  critic  said 
by  implication  that  it  wasn't  high  and  fine,  through  the 
remark,  'High  and  fine  literature  is  wine,'  I  retorted 
(confidentially  to  myself),  'Yes,  high  and  fine  literature 
is  wine,  and  mine  is  only  water;  but  everybody  likes 
water.'  "  That  is  frank  enough;  he  is  not  always  so. 
There  is  a  note  of  unconscious  guile,  the  guile  of  the 
peasant,  of  the  sophisticated  small  boy,  in  the  letter  he 
wrote  to  Andrew  Lang,  beseeching  a  fair  hearing  in 
England  for  the  "Connecticut.  Yankee."  He  rails 
against  "the  cultivated-class  standard";  he  half  poses 
,  as  an  uplif  ter  of  the  masses ;  then,  with  a  touch  of  mock- 
noble  indignation,  he  confesses  to  being  a  popular  enter- 
tainer, fully  convinced  at  least  that  there  are  two  kinds 
of  literature  and  that  an  author  ought  to  be  allowed  to 
put  upon  his  book  an  explanatory  line : ' '  This  is  written 
for  the  Head,"  or  "This  is  written  for  the  Belly  or  the 
Members."  No  plea  more  grotesque  or  more  pathetic 
was  ever  written  by  a  man  with  a  great  reputation  to 
support.  It  shows  that  Mark  Twain  was  completely 
ignorant  of  literary  values:  had  he  not  wished  upon 
literature,  as  it  were,  a  separation  between  the  ''Head" 
and  the  "Belly"  which,  as  we  shall  see,  had  s:mply 
taken  place  in  himself?  Out  of  his  own  darkness  he 
begs  for  the  word  of  salvation  from  one  who  he  thinks 
can  bestow  it. 

I  Mark  Twain,  in  short,  knew  very  well — for  I  think 
these  illustrations  prove  it — that  there  was  something 
decidedly  different  between  himself  and  a  great  writer. 
In  that  undifferentiated  mob  of  celebrities,  great,  and 
less  great,  and  far  from  great,  amid  which  he  moved  for 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  21 

a  generation,  he  was  a  favored  equal.  But  in  the  inti- 
mate presence  of  some  isolated  greatness  he  reverted  to 
the  primitive  reverence  of  the  candidate  for  the  mysta- 
gogue.  Was  it  Emerson?  He  ceased  to  be  a  fellow 
writer,  he  became  one  of  the  devout  Yankee  multitude. 
Was  it  Browning?  He  forgot  the  man  he  had  so 
cordially  known  in  the  poet  whom  he  studied  for  a  time 
with  the  naive  self-abasement  of  a  neophyte.  Was  it 
Mommsen  ?  Eead  this  humorous  entry  in  one  of  his  Ber- 
lin note-books:  ''Been  taken  for  Mommsen  twice.  We 
have  the  same  hair,  but  on  examination  it  was  found 
the  brains  were  different."  In  fact,  whenever  he  uses 
the  word  "literature"  in  connection  with  his  own  work 
it  is  with  a  sudden  self-consciousness  that  lets  one  into 
fhe  secret  of  his  inner  humility.  "I  am  the  only  literary 
animal  of  my  particular  subspecies  who  has  ever  been 
given  a  degree  by  any  college  in  any  age  of  the  world, 
so  far  as  I  know,"  he  writes  to  the  authorities  of  Yale 
in  1888.  A  man  who  freely  compared  himself  with  the 
melodeon,  as  distinguished  from  the  opera,  who,  in  the 
preface  to  "Those  Extraordinary  Twins,"  invited  his 
readers,  who  already  knew  how  "the  born  and  trained 
novelist  works,"  to  see  how  the  "jack-leg"  does  it,  could 
never  have  been  accused  of  not  knowing  his  true  rank. 
"You  and  I  are  but  sewing-machines,"  he  says  in 
"What  Is  Man?"  "We  must  turn  out  what  we  can; 
we  must  do  our  endeavor  and  care  nothing  at  all  when 
the  unthinking  reproach  us  for  not  turning  out  Gobe- 
lins. ' ' 

I  think  we  are  in  a  position  now  to  understand  that 
boundless  comic  impudence  of  Mark  Twain's,  that  comic 
impudence  which  led  him  to  propose  to  Edwin  Booth 
in  1873  a  new  character  for  "Hamlet,"  which  led  him 
to  telegraph  to  W.  T.  Stead:  "The  Czar  is  ready  to 
disarm.  I  am  ready  to  disarm.  Collect  the  others;  it 
should  not  be  much  of  a  task  no,w ' ' ;  which  led  him,  at 
the  outset  of  h?s  career,  to  propose  the  conundrum, 


22      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

"Why  am  I  like  the  Pacific  Ocean?"  and  to  answer  it 
thus:  "I  don't  know.  I  was  just  asking  for  informa- 
tion." Tempting  Providence,  was  he  not,  this  child  of 
good  fortune?  Literally,  yes;  he  was  trying  out  the 
fates.  If  he  had  not  had  a  certain  sense  of  colossal 
force,  it  would  never  have  occurred  to  him,  however 
humorously,  to  place  himself  on  an  equality  with 
Shakespeare,  to  compare  his  power  with  that  of  the 
Czar  and  his  magnitude  with  that  of  the  Pacific  Ocean. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  would  never  have  occurred 
to  him  to  make  these  comparisons  if  he  had  felt  himself 
in  possession,  in  control,  of  that  force..  Men  who  are 
not  only  great  in  energy  but  masters  of  themselves  let 
their  work  speak  for  them ;  men  who  are  not  masters  of 
themselves,  whose  energy,  however  great,  is  not,  so  to 
speak,  at  the  disposal  of  their  own  spirits,  are  driven, 
as  we  see  Mark  Twain  perpetually  driven,  to  seek  cor- 
roboration  from  without;  for  his  inner  self,  at  these 
moments,  wished  to  be  assured  that  he  really  was  great 
and  powerful  like  the  Pacific  and  Shakespeare  and  the 
Czar.  He  resembled  those  young  boys  who  have  inher- 
ited great  fortunes  which  they  own  but  cannot  com- 
mand ;  the  power  is  theirs  and  yet  they  are  not  in  control 
of  it ;  consequently,  in  order  to  reassure  themselves,  they 
are  always  "showing  off."  We  are  not  mistaken,  there- 
fore, in  feeling  that  in  this  comic  impudence  Mark 
Twain  actually  was  interrogating  destiny,  feeling  out 
.  ,his  public,  in  other  words,  which  had  in  its  hands  the 
\  disposal  of  that  ebullient  energy  of  his,  an  energy  that 
he  could  not  measure,  eouTd^nbt  estimate,  that  seemed 
to  him  simply  of  an  indeterminable,  untestable,  and 
above  all  uncontrollable  abundance.  Did  he  not,  in  this 
childlike  self-magnification,  combined  with  an  instinc- 
tive trust  in  luck  that  never  left  him,  resemble  the 
barbarian  conquerors  of  antiquity?  Not  one  of  these, 
in  the  depth  of  that  essential  self-ignorance,  that  lack 
of  inner  control  that  makes  one's  sole  criterion  the 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  23 

magnitude  of  one's  grasp  over  the  outer  world,  ever 
more  fully  felt  himself  the  man  of  destiny.  All  his  life 
Mark  Twain  was  attended  by  what  Mr.  Paine  calls 
"psychic  evidences";  he  never  fails  to  note  the  marvel- 
ous coincidences  of  which  he  is  the  subject ;  he  is  always 
being  struck  by  some  manifestation  of  "mental  teleg- 
raphy ' ' — he  invented  the  phrase ;  strange  phenomena  of 
nature  rise  up  in  his  path.  Three  times,  while  crossing 
the  ocean,  he  sees  a  lunar  rainbow,  and  each  time  he 
stakes  it  as  a  presage  of  good  fortune.  Not  one  of  the 
I  barbarian  conquerors  of  antiquity,  I  say,  those  essential 
lopposites  of  tie  creative  spirit,  whose  control  is  alto- 
gether internal,  and  who  feels  himself  the  master  of  his 
own  fate,  could  have  been  more  in  character  than  was 
Mark  Twain  when  he  observed,  a  few  months  before  his 
death:  "I  came  in  with  Halley's  comet  in  1835.  It  is 
coming  again  next  year,  and  I  expect  to  go  out  with  it. 
It  will  be  the  greatest  disappointment  of  my  life  if  I 
don't  go  out  with  Halley's  comet.  The  Almighty  has 
said,  no  doubt:  'Now  here  are  these  two  unaccountable 
freaks,  they  came  in  together,  they  must  go  out  to- 
gether.' Oh!  I  am  looking  forward  to  that." 

A  comet,  this  time !  And  a  few  pages  back  we  found 
him  comparing  himself  with  a  sewing-machine.  Which 
is  he,  one,  or  the  other,  or  both?  He  seems  to  exhibit 
himself,  on  the  one  hand,  as  a  child  of  nature  conscious 
of  extraordinary  powers  that  make  all  the  world  and 
even  the  Almighty  solicitous  about  him,  and  on  the 
other,  as  a  humble,  a  humiliated  man,  confessedly 
second-rate,  who  has  lost  nine  of  the  ten  talents  com- 
mitted to  him  and  almost  begs  permission  to  keep  the 
one  that  remains.  A  great  genius,  in  short,  that  has 
never  attained  the  inner  control  which  makes  genius 
great,  a  mind  that  has  not  found  itself,  a  mind  that  does 
not  know  itself,  a  spirit  that  cloaks  to  the  end  in  the 
fantasy  of  its  temporal  power  the  tragic  reality  of  its 
own  essential  miscarriage ! 


24       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

We  are  in  possession  now,  it  seems  to  me,  of  the  secret 
of  Mark  Twain's  mechanistic  philosophy,  the  philosophy 
of  that  little  book  which  he  called  his  " Bible,"  "What 
Is  Man?"  He  was  extremely  proud  of  the  structure 
of  logic  he  had  built  up  on  the  thesis  that  man  is  a 
machine,  "moved,  directed,  commanded  by  exterior  in- 
fluences, solely,"  that  he  is  "a  chameleon,  who  takes  the 
color  of  his  place  of  resort,"  that  he  is  "a  mere  coffee- 
mill,"  which  is  permitted  neither  "to  supply  the  coffee 
nor  turn  the  crank."  He  confesses  to  a  sort  of  pro- 
prietary interest  and  pleasure  in  the  validity  of  that 
notion.  "Having  found  the  Truth,"  he  says,  "preceiv- 
ing  that  beyond  question  man  has  but  one  moving  im- 
pulse— the  contenting  of  his  own  spirit — and  is  merely 
a  machine  and  entitled  to  no  personal  merit  for  what 
he  does,  it  is  not  humanly  possible  for  me  to  seek  further. 
The  rest  of  my  days  will  be  spent  in  patching  and  paint- 
ing and  puttying  and  calking  my  priceless  possession 
and  in  looking  the  other  way  when  an  imploring  argu- 
ment or  a  damaging  fact  approaches."  You  see  how 
it  pleases  him,  how  much  it  means  to  him,  that  final 
"Truth,"  how  he  clings  to  it  with  a  sort  of  defiant 
insolence  against  the  "imploring  argument,"  the  "dam- 
aging fact "  ?  "  Man  originates  nothing, ' '  he  says,  * '  not 
even  a  thought.  .  .  .  Shakespeare  could  not  create.  He 
was  a  machine,  and  machines  do  not  create."  F  dth 
never  gave  the  believer  more  comfort  than  t'rs  phil- 
osophy gave  Mark  Twain. 

But  is  it  possible  for  a  creative  mind  to  f!  u  "<xn- 
tentment"  in  denying  the  possibility  of  eree-if  i  Ai  i 
why  should  any  one  find  pride  and  sati^  !?ac  :i  n  ;n  t)  ft 
belief  that  man  is  wholly  irresponsible  in  tho  IP  rial  e-f 
"free  will"?  One  remembers  the  faVe  o:  t*  <  fix  and 
the  sour  grapes,  one  remembers  all  tl  ose  fo-  DIM  and 
tragic  souls  who  find  comfort  in  saying  tha  !;_•  e  exists 
nowhere  in  the  world  because  they  theimelv  is  have 
missed  it.  Certainly  it  could  not  have  ;  ffo:-d-<?  VTark 


Mark  Twain's  Despair  25 

Twain  any  pleasure  to  feel  that  he  was  '  -ntitled  to 
no  personal  merit"  for  what  he  had  done,  f ( j  what  he 
had  achieved  in  life;  the  pleasure  he  felt  sprang  from 
the  relief  his  theory  afforded  him,  the  relief  of  feeling 
that  he  was  not  responsible  for  what  he  had  failed  to 
achieve — namely,  his  proper  development  as  an  artist. 
He  says  aloud,  ' '  Shakespeare  could  not  create, ' '  and  his 
inner  self  adds,  "How  in  the  world,  then,  could  I  have 
done  so?"  He  denies  "free  will"  because  the  creative 
life  is  the  very  embodiment  of  it — the  emergence,  that 
is  to  say,  the  activity  in  a  man  of  one  central,  dominant, 
integrating  principle  that  turns  the  world  he  confronts 
into  a  mere  instrument  for  the  registration  of  his  own 
preferences.  There  is  but  one  interpretation,  conse- 
quently, which  we  can  put  upon  Mark  Twain's  delight 
in  the  conception  of  man  as  an  irresponsible  machine: 
it  brought  him  comfort  to  feel  that  if  he  was,  as  he  said, 
a  "sewing-machine,"  it  was  the  doing  of  destiny,  and 
that  nothing  he  could  have  done  himself  would  have 
enabled  him  to  "turn  out  Gobelins." 

From  his  philosophy  alone,  therefore,  we  can  see  thatv 
Mark  Twain  was  a  frustrated  spirit,  a  victim  of  arrestedf  \ 
development,  and  beyond  this  fact,  as  we  know  from'  \ 
innumerable    instances   the    psychologists   have    placed', 
before  us,  we  need  not  look  for  an  explanation  of  the; 
chagrin  of  his  old  age.     He  had  been  balked,  he  had! 
been  divided,  he  had  even  been  turned,  as  we  shall  see, 
against  himself ;  the  poet,  the  artist  in  him,  consequently, ' 
had  withered  into  the  cynic  and  the  whole  man  had 
become  a  spiritual  valetudinarian. 

But  this  is  a  long  story :  to  trace  it  we  shall  have  to 
glance  not  only  at  Mark  Twain's  life  and  work,  but  also 
at  the  epoch  and  the  society  in  which  he  lived. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   CANDIDATE   FOB  LIFE 

"One  is  inclined  to  say  that  the  source  of  sensibility  is  dried 
up  in  this  people.  They  are  just,  they  are  reasonable,  but  they 
are  essentially  not  happy." 

STENDHAL:  On  Love  in  the  United  States. 

IN  1882,  Mark  Twain,  who  had  been  living  for  so  many 
years  in  the  East,  revisited  the  great  river  of  his 
childhood  and  youth  in  order  to  gather  material  for  his 
book,  "Life  on  the  Mississippi."  It  was,  naturally,  a 
profound  and  touching  experience,  and  years  later  he 
told  Mr.  Paine  what  his  thoughts  and  memories  had 
been.  He  had  intended  to  travel  under  an  assumed 
name,  to  pass  unknown  among  those  familiar  scenes,  but 
the  pilot  of  the  steamer  Gold  Dust  recognized  him. 
Mark  Twain  haunted  the  pilot-house  and  even,  as  in 
days  of  old,  took  his .  turn  at  the  wheel.  "We  got  to 
be  good  friends,  of  course,"  he  said,  ''and  I  spent  most 
of  my  time  up  there  with  him.  When  we  got  down  be- 
low Cairo,  and  there  was  a  big,  full  river — for  it  was 
high-water  season  and  there  was  no  danger  of  the  boat 
hitting  anything  so  long  as  she  kept  in  the  river — I  had 
her  most  of  the  time  on  his  watch.  He  would  lie  down 
and  sleep,  and  leave  me  there  to  dream  that  the  years 
had  not  slipped  away ;  that  there  had  been  no  war,  no 
mining  days,  no  literary  adventures;  that  I  was  still  a 
pilot,  happy  and  care-free  as  I  had  been  twenty  years 
before." 

Was  it  merely  a  sentimental  regret,  however  poignant, 
that  Mark  Twain  recorded  in  these  words,  a  regret  for 
36 


The  Candidate  for  Life          27 

the  passing  of  time  and  the  charm  and  the  hope  of 
youth?  That  little  note  of  depreca,tjon--Eegardmg  his  \ 
* '  literary  adventures ' '  sets  one  thinking.  It  is  not  alto- 
gether flattering  to  the  self-respect  of  a  veteran  man  of 
letters !  And  besides,  we  say  to  ourselves,  if  that  earlier 
vocation  of  his  had  been  merely  "happy  and  care- free" 
a  man  of  Mark  Twain's  energy  and  power  could  hardly, 
in  later  life,  have  so  idealized  it.  For  idealize  it  he  cer- 
tainly did :  all  his  days  he  looked  back  upon  those  four 
years  on  the  Mississippi  as  upon  a  lost  paradise.  "I'd 
rather  be  a  pilot  than  anything  else  I've  ever  done  in 
my  life,"  he  told  his  old  master,  Horace  Bixby.  "I  am 
a  person,"  he  wrote  to  Mr.  Howells  in  1874,  "who  would 
quit  authorizing  in  a  minute  to  go  to  piloting,  if  the 
Madam  would  stand  it."  Quite  an  obsession,  we  see; 
and  that  he  had  found  that  occupation  deeply,  actively 
satisfying,  that  it  seemed  to  him  infinitely  worthy  and 
beautiful  is  proved  not  only  by  the  tender  tone  in  which 
he  habitually  spoke  of  it  but  by  the  fact  that  the  earlier 
pages  of  ' '  Life  on  the  Mississippi, ' '  in  which  he  pictures 
it,  are  the  most  poetic,  the  most  perfectly  fused  and 
expressive  that  he  ever  wrote. 

It  was  not  a  sentimental  regret,  then,  that  lifelong 
hankering  for  the  lost  paradise  of  the  pilot-house.  It 
was  something  more  organic,  and  Mark  Twain  provides 
us  with  an  explanation.  '"If  I  have  seemed  to  love  my 
subject,"  he  says,  among  the  impassioned  pages  of  his 
book,  "it  is  no  surprising  thing,  for  I  loved  the  profes- 
sion far  better  than  any  I  have  followed  since,  and  I 
took  a  measureless  pride  in  it."  A  singular  statement 
for  a  man  to  make  out  of  the  fullness  of  a  literary  life, 
the  two  pillars  of  which,  if  it  has  any  pillars,  are  noth- 
ing else  than  love  and  pride!  But  Mark  Twain  writes 
those  words  with  an  almost  unctuous  gravity  of  convic- 
tion, and  this,  in  so  many  words,  is  what  he  says :  as  a 
pilot  he  had  experienced  the  full  flow  of  the  creative 
life  as  he  had  not  experienced  it  in  literature.  Strange 


28      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

a»  that  may  seem,  we  cannot  question  it ;  we  have, 
ply,  to  explain  it.  The  life  of  a  Mississippi  pilot  hadP 
in  some  special  way,  satisfied  the  instinct  of  the  artist 
in  him;  in  quite  this  way,  the  instinct  of  the  artist  in 
him  had  never  been  satisfied  again.  We  do  not  have 
to  look  beyond  this  in  order  to  interpret,  if  not  the  faet, 
at  least  the  obsession.  He  felt  that,  in  some  way,  he 
had  been  as  a  pilot  on  the  right  track ;  and  he  felt  that 
he  had  lost  this  track.  If  he  was  always  harking  back 
to  that  moment,  then,  it  was,  we  can  hardly  escape 
feeling,  with  a  vague  hope  of  finding  again  some  scent 
that  was  very  dear  to  him,  of  recovering  some  precious 
thread  of  destiny,  of  taking  some  fresh  start.  Is  it' 
possible  that  he  had,  in  fact,  found  himself  in  his  career 
as  a  pilot  and  lost  himself  with  that  career?  It  is  a 
bold  hypothesis,  and  yet  I  think  a  glance  at  Mark 
Twain's  childhood  will  bear  it  out.  We  shall  have  to 
see  first  what  sort  of  boy  he  was,  and  what  sort  of  society 
it  was  he  grew  up  in ;  then  we  shall  be  able  to  under- 
stand what  unique  opportunities  for  personal  growth 
the  career  of  a  pilot  afforded  him. 

What  a  social  setting  it  was,  that  little  world  into 
which  Mark  Twain  was  born !  It  was  drab,  it  was  tragic. 
In  "Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "Tom  Sawyer"  we  see 
it  in  the  color  of  rose ;  and  besides,  we  see  there  only  a 
later  phase  of  it,  after  Mark  Twain's  family  had  settled 
in  Hannibal,  on  the  Mississippi.  He  was  five  at  the 
time;  his  eyes  had  opened  on  such  a  scene  as  we  find 
in  the  early  pages  of  "The  Gilded  Age."  That  weary, 
discouraged  father,  struggling  against  conditions  amid 
which.^  as  he  says,  a  man  can  do  nothing  but  rot  away, 
that  kind,  worn,  wan,  desperately  optimistic,  fanatically 
energetic  mother,  those  ragged,  wretched  little  children, 
sprawling  on  the  floor,  "sopping  corn-bread  in  some 
gravy  left  in  the  bottom  of  a  frying-pan  "—it  is  the  epic 
not  only  of  Mark  Twain's  infancy  but  of  a  whole  phase 


The  Candidate  for  Life  29 

of  American  civilization.  How  many  books  have  been 
published  of  late  years  letting  us  behind  the  scenes  of 
the  glamorous  myth  of  pioneering!  There  is  E.  II. 
Howe's  "Story  of  a  Country  Town,"  for  instance, 
that  Western  counterpart  in  sodden  misery  of  "Ethan 
Frome ' ' — a  book  which  has  only  begun  to  find  its  public. 
This  astonishing  Mr.  Howe,  who  is  so  painfully  honest, 
tells  us  in  so  many  words  that  in  all  his  early  days  he 
never  saw  a  woman  who  was  not  anaemic  and  fretful, 
a  man  who  was  not  moody  and  taciturn,  a  child  who 
was  not  stunted  from  hard  labor  or  under-nourishment. 
No  wonder  he  has  come  to  believe,  as  he  tells  us  frankly 
in  a  later  book,  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  love  in 
the  world !  Think  of  those  villages  Mark  Twain  himself 
has  pictured  for  us,  with  their  shabby,  unpainted  shacks, 
dropping  with  decay,  the  broken  fences,  the  litter  of 
rusty  cans  and  foul  rags,  how  like  the  leavings  of  some 
vast  over-turned  scrap-basket,  some  gigantic  garbage- 
can  !  Human  nature  was  not  responsible  for  this  debris 
of  a  too  unequal  eombat  with  circumstance,  nor  could 
human  nature  rise  above  it.  "Gambling,  drinking  and 
murder,"  we  are  told,  were  the  diversions  of  the  capital 
city  of  Nevada  in  the  days  of  the  gold-rush.  It  was  not 
very  different  in  normal  times  along  the  Mississippi. 
Hannibal  was  a  small  place ;  yet  Mr.  Paine  records  four 
separate  murders  which  Mark  Twain  actually  witnessed 
as  a  boy :  every  week  he  would  see  some  drunken  ruffian 
run  amuck,  he  saw  negroes  struck  down  and  killed,  he 
saw  men  shot  and  stabbed  in  the  streets.  "How  many 
gruesome  experiences,"  exclaims  Mr.  Paine,  "there 
appear  to  have  been  in  those  early  days ! ' '  But  let  us  be 
moderate:  every  one  was  not  violent.  As  for  the  major- 
ity of  the  settlers,  it  is  to  the  honor  of  mankind  that 
history  calls  them  heroes;  and  if  that  is  an  illusion, 
justice  will  never  be  realistic.  The  gods  of  Greece  would 
have  gone  unwashed  and  turned  gray  at  forty  and  lost 


30      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

their  digestion  and  neglected  their  children  if  they  had 
been  pioneers :  Apollo  himself  would  have  relapsed  into 
an  irritable  silence. 

A  desert  of  human  sand! — the  barrenest  spot  in  all 
Christendom,  surely,  for  the  seed  of  genius  to  fall  in. 
John  Hay,  revisiting  these  regions  after  having  lived  for 
several  years  in  New  England,  wrote  in  one  of  his  let- 
ters: "I  am  removed  to  a  colder  mental  atmosphere. 
...  I  find  only  a  dreary  waste  of  heartless  materialism, 
where  great  and  heroic  qualities  may  indeed  bully  their 
way  up  into  the  glare,  but  the  flowers  of  existence  inevit- 
ably droop  and  wither." 

Here  Mark  Twain  was  born,  and  in  a  loveless  house- 
hold: the  choice  of  his  mother's  heart,  Mr.  Paine  tells 
us,  had  been  "a  young  physician  of  Lexington  with 
whom  she  had  quarreled,  and  her  prompt  engagement 
with  John  Clemens  was  a  matter  of  temper  rather  than 
tenderness."  Mark  Twain  "did  not  remember  ever 
having  seen  or  heard  his  father  laugh,"  we  are  told,  and 
only  once,  when  his  little  brother  Benjamin  lay  dying, 
had  he  seen  one  member  of  his  family  kiss  another.  His 
father,  absorbed  in  a  perpetual  motion  machine, ' '  seldom 
devoted  any  time  to  the  company  of  his  children."  No 
wonder,  poor  man ;  the  palsy  of  a  long  defeat  lay  upon 
him;  besides,  every  spring  he  was  prostrated  with  a 
nerve-racking  "sun-pain"  that  would  have  checked  the 
humane  impulses  of  an  archangel.  Even  his  mother,  the 
backbone  of  the  family,  was  infatuated  with  patent 
medicines,  "pain-killers,"  health  periodicals — we  have  it 
from  "Tom  Sawyer" — "she  was  an  inveterate  experi- 
menter in  these  things."  They  were  all,  we  see,  living 
on  the  edge  of  their  nerves,  a  harsh,  angular,  desiccated 
existence,  like  so  many  rusty  machines,  without  enough 
oil,  without  enough  power,  grating  on  their  own  metal. 

Little  Sam,  as  every  one  called  him,  was  the  fifth  child 
in  this  household,  "a  puny  baby  with  a  wavering  prom- 
ise of  life" ;  it  is  suggested  that  he  was  not  wanted.  Mr. 


The  Candidate  for  Life          31 

Paine  speaks  of  him  somewhere  as  "high-strung  and 
neurotic."  We  are  not  surprised,  therefore,  to  find  him 
at  three  and  four  "a  wild-headed,  impetuous  child  of 
sudden  ecstasies  that  sent  him  capering  and  swinging  his 
arms,  venting  his  emotions  in  a  series  of  leaps  and  shrieks 
and  somersaults,  and  spasms  of  laughter  as  he  lay  rolling 
in  the  grass. ' '  This  is  the  child  who  is  to  retain  through 
life  that  exquisite  sensibility  of  which  so  many  observers 
have  spoken.  "Once  when  I  met  him  in  the  country," 
says  Mr.  Howells,  for  example,  of  his  later  life,  "he  had 
just  been  sickened  by  the  success  of  a  gunner  in  bringing 
down  a  blackbird;  and  he  described  the  poor,  stricken, 
glossy  thing,  how  it  lay  throbbing  its  life  out  on  the 
grass,  with  such  pity  as  he  might  have  given  a  wounded 
child."  Already,  in  his  infancy,  his  gentle,  winning 
manner  and  smile  make  him  every  one's  favorite.  A 
very  special  little  flower  of  life,  you  see,  capable  of  such 
feeling  that  at  twenty-three  his  hair  is  to  turn  gray  in 
the  tragic  experience  of  his  brother 's  death.  A  flower  of 
life,  a  wild  flower,  and  infinitely  fragile:  the  doctor  is 
always  being  called  in  his  behalf.  Before  he  grows  up 
he  is  to  have  prophetic  dreams,  but  now  another  neurotic 
symptom  manifests  itself.  In  times  of  family  crisis,  at 
four,  when  one  of  his  sisters  is  dying,  at  twelve,  after 
the  death  of  his  father,  he  walks  in  his  sleep :  often  the 
rest  of  the  household  get  up  in  the  middle  of  the  night 
to  find  this  delicate  little  waif  with  his  eyes  shut  "fret- 
ting with  cold  in  some  dark  corner." 

Can  we  not  already  see  in  this  child  the  born,  pre- 
destined artist?  And  what  sort  of  nurture  will  his 
imagination  have?  He  is  abandoned  to  the  fervid 
influences  of  the  negro  slaves, — for  his  father  had  mo- 
ments of  a  relative  prosperity.  Crouching  in  their 
cabins,  he  drinks  in  wild,  weird  tales  of  blood-curdling 
African  witchcraft.  "Certainly,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "an 
atmosphere  like  this  meant  a  tropic  development  for 
the  imagination  of  a  delicate  child."  One  thinks  in- 


32       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

deed  of  an  image  that  would  have  pleased  Heine,  the 
image  of  a  frail  snow-plant  of  the  North  quivering, 
flaming  in  the  furnace  of  the  jungle.  Mark  Twain 
appears  to  have  been  from  the  outset  a  center  of  in- 
terest, radiating  a  singular  potency;  and  the  more  his 
spirit  was  subjected  to  such  a  fearful  stimulus  the 
more  urgently  he  required  for  his  normal  develop- 
ment the  calm,  clairvoyant  guidance  a  pioneer  child 
could  never  have  had.  The  negroes  were  "in  real 
charge  of  the  children  and  supplied  them  with  entertain- 
ment. ' '  What  other  influence  was  there  to  counter- 
balance this? 

One,  and  one  only,  an  influence  tragic  in  its  ultimate 
consequences,  the  influence  of  Mark  Twain's  mother. 
That  poor,  taciturn,  sunstruck  failure,  John  Clemens, 
was  a  mere  pathetic  shadow  beside  the  woman  whose 
portrait  Mark  Twain  has  drawn  for  us  in  the  Aunt 
Polly  of  "Tom  Sawyer."  She  who  was  regarded  as  a 
"character"  by  all  the  town,  who  was  said  to  have  been 
"the  handsomest  girl  and  the  wittiest,  as  well  as  the 
bast  dancer,  in  all  Kentucky,"  who  was  still  able  to 
dance  at  80,  and  lived  to  be  87,  who  belonged,  in  shorf. 
to  "the  long-lived,  energetic  side  of  the  house,"  directed 
her  children,  we  are  told — and  we  can  believe  it — "with 
considerable  firmness."  And  what  was  the  inevitable 
relationship  between  her  and  this  little  boy?  "She  had 
a  weakness,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "for  the  child  that  de- 
manded most  of  her  mother's  care  .  .  .  All  were  tracta- 
ble and  growing  in  grace  but  little  Sam  ...  a  delicate 
little  lad  to  be  worried  over,  mothered,  or  spanked  and 
put  to  bed."  In  later  life,  "you  gave  me  more  uneasi- 
ness than  any  child  I  had,"  she  told  him.  In  fact,  ghe 
was  always  scolding  him,  comforting  him,  forgiving  him, 
punishing  and  pleading  with  him,  fixing  her  attention 
upon  him,  exercising  her  emotions  about  him,  impressing 
it  upon  his  mind  for  all  time,  as  we  shall  come  to  see. 


The  Candidate  for  Life          33 

that  woman  is  the  inevitable  seat  of  authority  and  the 
fount  of  wisdom. 

We  know  that  such  excessive  influences  are  apt  to 
deflect  the  growth  of  any  spirit.  Men  are  like  planets 
in  this,  that  for  them  to  sail  clear  in  their  own  orbits 
the  forces  of  gravity  have  to  be  disposed  with  a  certain 
balance  on  all  sides:  how  often,' when  the  father  counts 
for  nothing,  a  child  becomes  the  satellite  of  its  mother, 
especially  when  that  mother's  love  has  not  found  its 
normal  expression  in  her  own  youth!  We  have  seen 
that  Mark  Twain's  mother  did  not  love  her  husband; 
that  her  capacity  for  love,  however,  was  very  great  is 
proved  by  the  singular  story  revealed  in  one  of  Mark 
Twain's  letters:  more  than  sixty  years  after  she  had 
quarreled  with  that  young  Lexington  doctor,  and  when 
her  husband  had  long  been  dead,  she,  a  woman  of  eighty 
or  more,  took  a  railway  journey  to  a  distant  city  where 
there  was  an  Old  Settlers'  convention  because  among  the 
names  of  those  who  were  to  attend  it  she  had  noticed  the 
name  of  the  lover  of  her  youth.  "Who  could  have 
imagined  such  a  heart-break  as  that  ? ' '  said  Mr.  Ho  wells, 
when  he  heard  the  story.  "Yet  it  went  along  with  the 
fulfillment  of  every-day  duty  and  made  no  more  noise 
than  a  grave  under  foot."  It  made  no  noise,  but  it 
undoubtedly  had  a  prodigious  effect  upon  Mark  Twain's 
life.  When  an  affection  as  intense  as  that  is  balked 
in  its  direct  path  and  repressed  it  usually,  as  we  know, 
finds  an  indirect  outlet ;  and  it  is  plain  that  the  woman 
as  well  as  the  mother  expressed  itself  in  the  passionate 
attachment  of  Jane  Clemens  to  her  son..--  We  shall  note 
many  consequences  of  this  fact  as  we  go  on  with  our 
story.  We  can  say  at  least  at  this  point  that  Mark 
Twain  was,  quite  definitely,  in  his  mother's  leading- 
strings. 

What  was  the  inevitable  result?  I  have  said,  not,  I 
hope,  with  too  much  presumption,  that  Mark  Twain  had 


34      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

,  already  shown  himself  the  born,  predestined  artist,  that 
l  his  whole  nature  manifested  what  is  called  a  tendency 
toward  the  creative  life.  For  that  tendency  to  become 
conscious,  to  become  purposive,  two  things  were  neces- 
sary: it  must  be  able,  in  the  first  place,  to  assert  itself 
and  in  the  second  place  to  embody  itself  in  a  vocation ; 
to  realize  itself  and  then  to  educate  itself,  to  realize 
itself  in  educating  itself.  And,  as  we  know,  the  influ- 
ences of  early  childhood  are,  in  these  matters,  vitally 
important.  If  Jane  Clemens  had  been  a  woman  of  wide 
experience  and  independent  mind,  in  proportion  to  the 
strength  of  her  character,  Mark  Twain's  career  might 
have  been  wholly  different.  (  Had  she  been  catholic  in 
her  sympathies,  in  her  understanding  of  life,  then,  no 
matter  how  more  than  maternal  her  attachment  to  her 
son  was,  she  might  have  placed  before  him  and  encour- 
aged him  to  pursue  interests  and  activities  amid  which 
he  could  eventually  have  recovered  his  balance,  reduced 
the  filial  bond  to  its  normal  measure  and  stood  on  his 
own  feet.  But  that  is  to  wish  for  a  type  of  woman  our 
old  pioneer  society  could  never  have  produced.  We  are 
told  that  the  Aunt  Polly  of  "Tom  Sawyer"  is  a  speak- 
ing portrait. of  Jane  Clemens,  and  Aunt  Polly,  as  we 
know,  was  the  symbol  of  all  the  taboos.  The  stronger 
her  will  was,  the  more  comprehensive  were  her  repres- 
sions, the  more  certainly  she  became  the  inflexible 
guardian  of  tradition  in  a  social  regime  where  tradition 
was  inalterably  opposed  to  every  sort  of  personal  devia- 
tion from  the  accepted  type.  ' '  In  their  remoteness  from 
,  the  political  centers  of  the  young  Republic,"  says  Mr. 
Howells,  in  "The  Leatherwood  God,"  of  these  old  Mid- 
dle Western  settlements,  "they  seldom  spoke  of  the  civic 
questions  stirring  the  towns  of  the  East ;  the  commercial 
and  industrial  problems  which  vex  modern  society  were 
unknown  to  them.  Religion  was  their  chief  interest." 
And  in  the  slave  States  it  was  not  the  abolitionist  alone 
whose  name  was  held,  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "in  horror," 


The  Candidate  for  Life          35 

but  every  one  who  had  the  audacity  to  think  differently 
from  his  neighbors.  Jane  Clemens,  in  short,  was  the 
embodiment  of  that  old-fashioned,  east-iron  Calvinism 
which  had  proved  so  favorable  to  the  life  of  enterprising 
action  but  which  perceived  the  scent  of  the  devil  in  any 
least  expression  of  what  is  now  known  as  the  creative 
impulse.  She  had  a  kind  heart,  she  was  always  repent- 
ing and  softening  and  forgiving;  it  is  said  that  when- 
ever she  had  to  drown  kittens,  she  warmed  the  water 
first.  But  this,  without  opening  any  channel  in  a  con- 
trary direction,  only  sealed  her  authority !  She  won  her 
points  as  much  by  kindness  as  by  law.  Besides,  tradition 
spoke  first  in  her  mind;  her  hand  was  quicker  than  her 
heart;  in  action  she  was  the  madonna  of  the  hairbrush. 
And  what,  specifically,  was  it  that  she  punished?  Those 
furtive  dealings  of  Huck  and  Tom  with  whitewash  and 
piracy  were  nothing  in  the  world — and  that  is  why  all 
the  world  loves  them — but  the  first  stirrings  of  the  nor- 
mal aesthetic  sense,  the  first  stirrings  of  individuality. 

Already  I  think  we  divine  what  was  bound  to  happen 
in  the  soul  of  Mark  Twain.  The  story  of  "Huckleberry 
Finn"  turns,  as  we  remember,  upon  a  conflict:  "the 
author,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "makes  Huck's  struggle  a 
psychological  one  between  conscience  and  the  law,  on 
one  side,  and  sympathy  on  the  other."  In  the  famous 
episode  of  Nigger  Jim,  "sympathy,"  the  cause  of  indi- 
vidual freedom,  wins.  Years  later,  in  "The  Mysterious 
Stranger, ' '  Mark  Twain  presented  the  parallel  situation 
we  noted  in  the  last  chapter:  "we  found,"  says  the  boy 
who  tells  that  story,  "that  we  were  not  manly  enough 
nor  brave  enough  to  do  a  generous  action  when  there 
was  a  chance  that  it  could  get  us  into  trouble."  Con- 
science and  the  law,  we  see,  had  long  since  prevailed  in 
'the  spirit  of  Mark  Twain,  but  what  is  the  conscience 
of  a  boy  who  checks  a  humane  impulse  but  "boy  terror," 
as  Mr.  Paine  calls  it,  an  instinctive  fear  of  custom,  of 
tribal  authority?  The  conflict  in  "Huckleberry  Finn" 


36      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

is  simply  the  conflict  of  Mark  Twain's  own  childhood. 
He  solved  it  successfully,  he  fulfilled  his  desire,  in  the 
book,  as  an  author  can.  In  actual  life  he  did  not  solve 
it  at  all;  he  surrendered. 

Turn  to  the  record  in  Mr.  Paine 's  biography.  We 
find  Mark  Twain  in  perpetual  revolt  against  all  those 
institutions  for  which  his  mother  stood.  "Church  ain't 
worth  shucks,"  says  Tom  Sawyer.  As  for  school,  "he 
never  learned  to  like  it.  Each  morning  he  went  with 
reluctance  and  remained  with  loathing — the  loathing 
which  he  always  had  for  anything  resembling  bondage 
and  tyranny  or  even  the  smallest  curtailment  of  lib- 
erty." One  recalls  what  Huck  said  of  Aunt  Polly  just 
before  he  made  his  escape  to  the  woods: 

"Don't  talk  about  it,  Tom.  I've  tried  it  and  it  don't  work;  it 
don't  work,  Tom.  It  ain't  for  me;  I  ain't  used  to  it.  The 
widder's  good  to  me,  and  friendly;  but  I  can't  stand  them  ways. 
She  makes  me  git  up  just  at  the  same  time  every  morning;  she 
makes  me  wash,  they  comb  me  all  to  thunder;  she  won't  let  me 
sleep  in  the  woodshed;  I  got  to  wear  them  blamed  clothes  that 
just  smothers  me,  Tom;  they  don't  seem  to  any  air  get  through 
'em  somehow,  and  they're  so  rotten  nice  that  I  can't  set  down, 
nor  lay  down,  nor  roll  around  anywher's;  I  hain't  slid  on  a 
cellar-door  for — well,  it  'pears  to  be  years;  I  got  to  go  to  church 
and  sweat  and  sweat — I  hate  them  ornery  sermons!  I  can't  ketch 
a  fly  in  there,  I  can 't  chaw,  I  got  to  wear  shoes  all  Sunday.  The 
widder  eats  by  a  bell;  she  goes  to  bed  by  a  bell;  she  gits  up  by 
a  bell— everything's  so  awful  reg'lar  a  body  can't  stand  it." 

But  Mark  Twain  did  not  escape  to  the  woods,  literally 
or  in  any  other  way.  He  never  even  imagined  that  his 
feelings  of  revolt  had  any  justification.  We  remember 
how,  when  Huck  and  Tom  were  caught  in  some  escapade, 
they  would  resolve  to  "lead  a  better  life,"  to  go  to 
church,  visit  the  sick,  carry  them  baskets  of  food  and 
subsist  wholly  upon  tracts.  That  was  what  Mark  Twain 
did:  "not  to  do  so,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "was  dangerous. 
Flames  were  being  kept  brisk  for  little  boys  who  were 
heedless  of  sacred  matters;  his  home  teaching  convinced 


The  Candidate  for  Life          37 

him  of  that,"  And  his  mother  was  so  strong,  so  cour- 
ageous, the  only  strong  and  courageous  influence  he 
knew.  "In  some  vague  way,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "he  set 
them  down" — the  fearful  spectacles  of  escaping  slaves, 
caught  and  beaten  and  sold — "as  warnings,  or  punish- 
ments, designed  to  give  him  a  taste  for  a  better  life." 
Warnings,  in  short,  not  to  tempt  Providence  himself, 
not  to  play  with  freedom!  "He  felt  that  it  was  his  own 
conscience  that  made  these  things  torture  him.  That 
was  his  mother 's  idea,  and  he  had  a  high  respect  for  her 
moral  opinions."  Naturally!  And  she  "punished  him 
and  pleaded  with  him,  alternately" — with  one  inevitable 
result.  "  '  To  fear  God  and  dread  the  Sunday  School, '  ' 
he  wrote  to  Mr.  Ho  wells  in  later  years,  "exactly  de- 
scribed that  old  feeling  which  I  used  to  have";  and  he 
tells  us  also  that  as  a  boy  he  wanted  to  be  a  preacher, 
"because  it  never  occurred  to  me  that  a  preacher  could 
be  damned. ' '  Can  we  not  see  that  already  the  boy  whose 
interests  and  preferences  and  activities  diverge  from 
those  of  the  accepted  type  had  become  in  his  eyes  the 
"bad"  boy,  that  individuality  itself,  not  to  mention  the 
creative  life,  had  become  for  him  identical  with  "sin"? 
Many  a  great  writer,  many  a  great  artist,  no  doubt, 
has  grown  up  and  flourished  like  a  blade  of  grass  be- 
tween the  cobblestones  of  Calvinism.  Scotland  has  a 
tale  to  tell.  But  Scotland  has  other  strains,  other  tradi- 
tions, books  and  scholars,  gaieties,  nobilities — how  can  , 
we  compare  the  fertile  human  soil  of  any  spot  in  Europe 
with  that  dry,  old,  barren,  horizonless  Middle  "West  of 
ours?  How  was  Mark  Twain  to  break  the  spell  of  his 
infancy  and  find  a  vocation  there  ?  Calvinism  itself  had  / 
gone  to  seed :  it  was  nothing  but  the  dead  hand  of  cus-  / 
torn ;  the  flaming  priest  had  long  since  given  way  to  / 
the  hysterical  evangelist.  Grope  as  he  might,  he  coulc  / 
find  nowhere,  either  in  men  or  in  "books,  the  bread  and;  / 
wine  of  the  spirit.  In  all  his  youth,  unless  we  except 
that  journeyman  chair-maker,  Frank  Burrough,  who 


82635 


38      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

had  a  taste  for  Dickens  and  Thackeray,  there  is  record 
of  only  one  thinking  soul  whom  he  encountered,  a 
Scotchman  named  Macfarlane,  whom  he  met  in  Cincin- 
nati. "They  were  long  fermenting  discourses,"  Mr. 
Paine  tells  us,  "that  young  Samuel  Clemens  listened  to 
that  winter  in  Macfarlane 's  room."  And  what  was  the 
counsel  which,  from  that  sole  source,  his  blind  and 
wavering  aptitude  received? — that  "man's  heart  was  the 
only  bad  one  in  the  animal  kingdom,  that  man  was  the 
only  animal  capable  of  malice,  vindictiveness,  drunken- 
ness" and  that  his  intellect  was  only  a  "depraving 
addition  to  him  which,  in  the  end,  placed  him  in  a  rank 
far  below  the  other  beasts. ' '  Propitious  words  for  this 
candidate  for  the  art  of  living!  And  as  with  men,  so 
it  was  with  books.  In  "Life  on  the  Mississippi"  there 
is  a  memorable  picture  of  the  library  in  the  typical 
gentleman's  house  all  the  way  from  St.  Louis  to  New 
Orleans:  Martin  Tupper,  "Friendship's  Offering," 
"Affection's  Wreath,"  Ossian,  "Alonzo  and  Melissa," 
"Ivanhoe,"  and  "Godey's  Lady's  Book,"  "piled  and 
disposed  with  cast-iron  exactness,  according  to  an  inher- 
ited and  unchangeable  plan."  How,  indeed,  could  the 
cultural  background  of  that  society  have  been  anything 
but  stagnant  when  no  fresh  stream  of  cultural  interest 
could  possibly  penetrate  through  the  foreground?  One 
day,  in  the  dusty,  littered  streets  of  Hannibal,  Mark 
Twain  picked  up  a  loose  page,  the  page  of  some  life  of 
Joan  of  Arc,  which  was  flying  in  the  wind.  That  seed, 
so  planted,  was  to  blossom  half  a  century  later:  even 
now  it  began  to  put  forth  little  tentative  shoots.  "It 
gave  him  his  cue,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "the  first  word  of  a 
part  in  the  human  drama,"  and  he  conceived  a  sudden 
interest  in  history  and  languages.  Anything  might 
have  come  of  that  impulse  if  it  had  had  the  least  pro- 
tection, if  it  had  been  able  to  find  a  guideway.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  as  a  matter  of  course,  it  perished  in  a 
joke. 


The  Candidate  for  Life          39 

In  all  his  environment,  then,  we  see,  there  was  noth- 
ing to  assist  in  the  transformation  of  an  unconscious 
artistic  instinct,  however  urgent,  into  a  conscious  art- 
istic purpose.  "Dahomey,"  wrote  Mark  Twain  once, 
"could  not  find  an  Edison  out;  in  Dahomey  an  Edison 
could  not  find  himself  out.  Broadly  speaking,1  genius 
is  not  born  with  sight  but  blind;  and  it  is  not  itself 
that  opens  its  eyes,  but  the  subtle  influences  of  a  myriad 
of  stimulating  exterior  circumstances/'  He  was  recit- 
ing his  own  story  in  those  words.  But  the  circumstances 
that  surrounded  Mark  Twain  were  not  merely  passively 
unfavorable  to  his  own  self-discovery;  they  were 
actively,  overwhelmingly  unfavorable.  He  was  in  his 
mother's  leading-strings,  and  in  his  mother's  eyes  any 
sort  of  personal  self-assertion  in  choices,  preferences, 
impulses  was,  literally,  sinful.  Thus  the  whole  weight 
of  the  Calvinistic  tradition  was  concentrated  against 
him  at  his  most  vulnerable  point.  His  mother,  whom  he 
could  not  gainsay,  was  unconsciously  but  inflexibly  set 
against  his  genius;  and  destiny,  which  always  fights  on 
the  side  of  the  heaviest  artillery,  delivered,  in  his  twelfth 
year,  a  stroke  that  sealed  her  victory. 

Mark  Twain's  father  died.  Let  Mr.  Paine  picture 
the  scene: 

"The  boy  Sam  was  fairly  broken  down.  Kemorse, 
which  always  dealt  with  him  unsparingly,  laid  a  heavy 
hand  on  him  now.  Wildness,  disobedience,  indifference 
to  his  father's  wishes,  all  were  remembered;  a  hundred 
things,  in  themselves  trifling,  became  ghastly  and  heart- 
wringing  in  the  knowledge  that  they  could  never  be 
undone.  Seen  g  his  grief,  his  mother  took  him  by  the 
hand  and  led  him  into  the  room  where  his  father  lay.  'It 
is  all  right,  Sammy,'  she  said.  'What's  done  is  done, 
and  it  does  not  matter  to  him  any  more;  but  here  by 

the  side  of  him  now  I  want  you  to  promise  me .' 

He  turned,  his  eyes  streaming  with  tears,  and  flung  him- 
self into  her  arms.  '  I  will  promise  anything, '  he  sobbed, 


40      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

'if  you  won't  make  me  go  to  school!  Anything!'  His 
mother  held  him  for  a  moment,  thinking,  then  she  said : 
'  No,  Sammy,  you  need  not  go  to  school  any  more.  Only 
promise  me  to  be  a  better  boy.  Promise  not  to  break 
my  heart.'  So  he  promised  her  to  be  a  faithful  and 
industrious  man,  and  upright,  like  his  father.  His 
mother  was  satisfied  with  that.  The  sense  of  honor  and 
justice  was  already  strong  within  him.  To  him  a  prom- 
ise was  a  serious  matter  at  any  time ;  made  under  con- 
ditions like  these  it  would  be  held  sacred.  That  night 
— it  was  after  the  funeral — his  tendency  to  somnambul- 
ism manifested  itself.  His  mother  and  sister,  who  were 
sleeping  together,  saw  the  door  open  and  a  form  in  white 
enter.  Naturally  nervous  at  such  a  time,  and  living  in 
a  day  of  almost  universal  superstition,  they  were  terri- 
fied and  covered  their  heads.  Presently  a  hand  was  laid 
on  the  coverlet,  first  at  the  foot,  then  at  the  head  of 
the  bed.  A  thought  struck  Mrs.  Clemens:  'Sam!'  she 
said.  He  answered,  but  he  was  sound  asleep  and  fell 
to  the  floor.  He  had  risen  and  thrown  a  sheet  around 
him  in  his  dreams.  He  walked  in  his  sleep  several 
nights  in  succession  after  that.  Then  he  slept  more 
soundly." 

Who  is  sufficiently  the  master  of  signs  and  portents 
to  read  this  terrible  episode  aright  ?  One  thing,  however, 
we  feel  with  irresistible  certitude,  that  Mark  Twain's 
fate  was  once  for  all  decided  there.  That  hour  by  his 
father's  corpse,  that  solemn  oath,  that  walking  in  his 
sleep — we  must  hazard  some  interpretation  of  it  all,  and 
I  think  we  are  justified  in  hazarding  as  most  likely  that 
which  explains  the  most  numerous  and  the  most  signifi- 
cant phenomena  of  his  later  life. 

To  a  hypersensitive  child  such  as  Mark  Twain  was  at 
eleven  that  ceremonious  confrontation  with  his  father's 
corpse  must,  in  the  first  place,  have  brought  a  profound 
nervous  shock.  Already,  we  are  told,  he  was  "broken 
down"  by  his  father's  death;  remorse  had  "laid  a  heavy 


The  Candidate  for  Life          41 

hand  on  him."  But  what  was  this  remorse;  what  had 
he  done  for  grief  or  shame?  "A  hundred  things  in 
themselves  trifling,"  which  had  offended,  in  reality,  not 
his  father's  heart  but  his  father's  will  as  a  conven- 
tional citizen  with  a  natural  desire  to  raise  up  a  family 
in  his  own  likeness.  Feeble,  frantic,  furtive  little  feel- 
ings-out of  this  moody  child,  the  first  wavering  steps  of 
the  soul,  that  is  what  they  have  really  been,  these 
peccadillos,  the  dawn  of  the  artist.  And  the  formidable' 
promptings  of  love  tell  him  that  they  are  sin!  He  is 
broken  down  indeed;  all  those  crystalline  fragments  of 
individuality,  still  so  tiny  and  so  fragile,  are  suddenly 
shattered;  his  nature,  wrought  upon  by  the  tense  heat 
of  that  hour,  has  become  again  like  soft  wax.  And  his 
mother  stamps  there,  with  awful  ceremony,  the  com- 
posite image  of  her  own  meager  traditions.  He  is  to 
go  forth  the  Good  Boy  by  force  majeure,  he  is  to  become 
such  a  man  as  his  father  would  have  approved  of,  he  is 
to  retrieve  his  father's  failure,  to  recover  the  lost  gentil- 
ity of  a  family  that  had  once  been  proud,  to  realize  that 
"mirage  of  wealth"  that  had  ever  hung  before  his 
father's  eyes.  And  to  do  so  he  is  not  to  quarrel  heed- 
lessly with  his  bread  and  butter,  he  is  to  keep  strictly 
within  the  code,  to  remember  the  maxims  of  Ben 
Franklin,  to  respect  all  the  prejudices  and  all  the  con- 
ventions; above  all,  he  is  not  to  be  drawn  aside  into 
any  fanciful  orbit  of  his  own!  .  .  .  Hide  your  faces, 
Huck  and  Tom!  Put  away  childish  things,  Sam 
Clemens;  go  forth  into  the  world,  but  remain  always  a 
child,  your  mother's  child!  In  a  day  to  come  you  will 
write  to  one  of  your  friends,  ''We  have  no  real  morals, 
but  only  artificial  ones — morals  created  and  preserved 
by  the  forced  suppression  of  natural  and  healthy  in- 
stincts." Never  mind  that  now;  your  mother  imagines 
her  heart  is  in  the  balance — will  you  break  it?  ... 
Will  you  promise  ?  .  .  .  And  the  little  boy,  in  the  terror 
of  that  presence,  sobs:  "Anything!" 


42      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

"There  is  in  every  man,"  said  Sainte-Beuve,  "a  poet 
who  dies  young."  In  truth,  the  poet  does  not  die;  he 
falls  into  a  fitful  tranee.  It  is  perfectly  evident  what 
happened  to  Mark  Twain  at  this  moment:  he  became, 
and  his  immediate  manifestation  of  somnambulism  is 
the  proof  of  it,  a  dual  personality.  If  I  were  sufficiently 
I,  hardy,  as  I  am  not,  I  should  say  that  that  little  sleep- 

"r  |  walker  who  appeared  at  Jane  Clemens 's  bedside  on  the 
night  of  her  husband's  funeral  was  the  spirit  of  Tom 
Sawyer,  come  to  demand  again  the  possession  of  his  own 
soul,  to  revoke  that  ruthless  promise  he  had  given.  He 
came  for  several  nights,  and  then,  we  are  told,  the  little 
boy  slept  more  soundly,  a  sign,  one  might  say,  if  one 
were  a  fortune-teller,  that  he  had  grown  accustomed  to 
the  new  and  difficult  role  of  being  two  people  at  once! 
The  subject  of  dual  personality  was  always,  as  we  shall 
see,  an  obsession  with  Mark  Twain;  he  who  seemed  to 
his  friends  such  a  natural-born  actor,  who  was,  in  child- 
hood, susceptible  not  only  to  somnambulism  but  to  mes- 
meric control,  had  shown  from  the  outset  a  distinct 
tendency  toward  what  is  called  dissociation  of  conscious- 
ness. His  "wish"  to  be  an  artist,  which  has  been  so 
frowned  upon  and  has  encountered  such  an  insurmount- 
able obstacle  in  the  disapproval  of  his  mother,  is  now 
repressed,  more  or  less  definitely,  and  another  wish,  that 
of  winning  approval,  which  inclines  him  to  conform 
with  public  opinion,  has  supplanted  it.  The  individual, 
in  short,  has  given  way  to  the  type.  The  struggle 
between  these  two  selves,  these  two  tendencies,  these 
two  wishes  or  groups  of  wishes,  will  continue  through- 
put Mark  Twain's  life,  and  the  poet,  the  artist,  the 
individual,  will  make  a  brave  effort  to  survive.  From 
the  death  of  his  father  onward,  however,  his  will  is 
A \  definitely  enlisted  on  the  side  opposed  to  his  essential 

V  1  instinct. 

^  When,  a  few  years  later,  Mark  Twain  leaves  home  on 
his  first  excursion  into  the  great  world,  he  gladly  takes 


The  Candidate  for  Life          43 

the  oath,  which  his  mother  administers,  "not  to  throw 
a  card  or  drink  a  drop  of  liquor"  while  he  is  away,  an 
oath  she  seals  with  a  kiss.  To  obey  Jane  Clemens,  to  do 
what  seems  good  in  her  eyes,  not  to  try  life  and  make 
his  own  rejections,  has  become  actually  pleasing  to  him ; 
it  is  his  own  will  to  make  the  journey  of  life  "in  bond," 
as  surely  as  any  box  that  was  ever  sent  by  freight. 
Never  was  an  adolescence  more  utterly  objective  than 
Mr.  Paine 's  record  shows  Mark  Twain's  to  have  been! 
For  several  years  before  he  was  twenty -one  he  drifted 
about  as  a  journeyman  printer :  he  went  as  far  East  as 
Washington,  Philadelphia  and  New  York.  This  latter 
journey  lasted  more  than  a  year;  one  might  have 
expected  it  to  open  before  him  an  immense  horizon; 
yet  he  seems,  to  judge  from  his  published  letters,  to 
have  experienced  not  one  of  the  characteristic  thoughts 
or  feelings  of  youth.  Never  a  hint  of  melancholy,  of 
aspiration,  of  hope,  depression,  joy,  even  ambition !  His 
letters  are  as  full  of  statistics  as  the  travel-reports  of  an 
engineer,  and  the  only  sensation  he  seems  to  experience 
is  the  tell-tale  sensation  of  home-sickness.  He  has  no 
wish  to  investigate  life,  to  think,  to  feel,  to  love.  He 
is,  in  fact,  under  a  spell.  He  is  inhibited,  he  inhibits 
himself,  even  from  seeking  on  his  own  account  that  vital 
experience  which  is  the  stuff  of  the  creative  life. 

Then,  suddenly,  comes  a  revolutionary  change.  He 
hears  "the  old  call  of  the  river."  He  becomes  a  pilot. 

Mr.  Paine  expresses  surprise  that  Mark  Twain  should 
have  embarked  upon  this  career  with  such  passionate 
earnestness,  that  the  man  whom  the  world  was  to  know 
later — "dreamy,  unpractical,  and  indifferent  to  details" 
— should  ever  have  persisted  in  acquiring  the  "abso- 
lutely limitless"  knowledge  it  necessitated.  He  explains 
it  by  the  fact  that  Mark  Twain  "loved  the  river  in  its 
every  mood  and  aspect  and  detail,  and  not  only  the 
river,  but  a  steamboat ;  and  still  more,  perhaps,  the  free- 
dom of  the  pilot's  life  and  its  prestige."  Mr.  Paine 


44      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

omits  one  important  particular.  We  have  seen  that  in 
Mark  Twain  two  opposed  groups  of  wishes — the  wish 
to  be  an  artist  and  the  wish  to  win  his  mother's  ap- 
proval, to  stand  in  with  pioneer  society — were  strug- 
gling for  survival.  "When  we  turn  to  his  account  of 
the  Mississippi  pilots,  their  life,  their  activities,  their 
social  position,  we  can  see  that  in  this  career  both  these 
wishes  were  satisfied  concurrently.  Piloting  was,  in  the 
first  place,  a  preeminently  respectable  and  lucrative 
occupation;  besides  this,  of  all  the  pioneer  types  of  the 
Mississippi  region,  the  pilot  alone  embodied  in  any  large 
measure  the  characteristics  of  the  artist:  in  him  alone 
these  characteristics  were  permitted,  in  him  they  were 
actually  encouraged,  to  survive. 

We  cannot  understand  why  this  was  so  without  bear- 
ing in  mind  a  peculiarity  of  the  pioneer  regime  upon 
which  we  shall  have  occasion  more  than  once  to  dwell. 
Mr.  Herbert  Croly  has  described  it  in  "The  Promise  of 
American  Life."  "In  such  a  society,"  says  Mr.  Croly, 
"a  man  who  persisted  in  one  job,  and  who  applied  the 
most  rigorous  and  exacting  standards  to  his  work,  was 
out  of  place  and  was  really  inefficient.  His  finished 
product  did  not  serve  its  temporary  purpose  much  bet- 
ter than  did  the  current  careless  and  hasty  product 
and  his  higher  standards  and  peculiar  ways  constituted 
an  implied  criticism  upon  the  easy  methods  of  his  neigh- 
bors. He  interfered  with  the  rough  good-fellowship 
which  naturally  arises  among  a  group  of  men  who  sub- 
mit good-naturedly  and  uncritically  to  current  stand- 
ards. It  is  no  wonder,  consequently,  that  the  pioneer 
democracy  viewed  with  distrust  and  aversion  the  man 
with  a  special  vocation  and  high  standards  of  achieve- 
ment. Such  a  man  did  insist  upon  being  in  certain 
respects  better  than  the  average;  and  under  the  pre- 
valent economic  social  conditions  he  did  impair  he 
consistency  of  feeling  upon  which  the  pioneers  rightly 
placed  such  a  high  value.  Consequently,  they  half 


The  Candidate  for  Life          45 

unconsciously  sought  to  suppress  men  with  special  voca- 
tions. ' ' 

Here,  of  course,  we  have  what  is  by  far  the  most 
important  fact  to  be  considered  in  any  study  of  the 
creative  life  in  the  West ;  as  we  shall  see,  Mark  Twain 
remained  all  his  life  in  this  sense  a  pioneer  in  his  own 
view  of  the  "special  vocation"  of  literature.  What  is 
to  be  noted  now  is  that  the  pilot  was  an  exception,  and 
the  only  exception  in  the  Mississippi  region,  to  this 
general  social  law.  In  Nevada,  in  California,  where 
Mark  Twain  was  to  live  later  and  where  he  was  to  begin 
his  literary  life,  there  were  no  exceptions;  the  system 
described  by  Mr.  Croly  reigned  in  its  most  extreme  and 
uncompromising  form;  every  one  had  to  be  a  jack-of- 
all-trades,  every  one  had  to  live  by  his  wits.  The  entire 
welfare,  almost  the  existence,  of  the  population  of  the 
Mississippi  valley,  on  the  other  hand,  depended,  before 
the  war,  upon  the  expert  skill  of  the  pilot ;  for  the  river 
traffic  to  be  secure  at  all,  he  alone,  but  he  at  least,  had 
to  be  a  craftsman,  a  specialist  of  the  very  highest  order. 
There  were  no  signal-lights  along  the  shore,  we  are 
told ;  the  river  was  full  of  snags  and  shifting  sand-bars ; 
the  pilot  had  to  know  every  bank  and  dead  tree  and 
reef,  every  cut-off  and  current,  every  depth  of  water, 
by  day  and  by  night,  in  the  whole  stretch  of  twelve 
hundred  miles  between  St.  Louis  and  New  Orleans;  he 
had  to  "smell  danger  in  the  dark  and  read  the  surface 
of  the  water  as  an  open  page."  Upon  his  mastery  of 
that  "supreme  science,"  as  it  was  called,  hung  all  the 
civilization  of  the  river  folk,  their  trade,  their  inter- 
course with  the  great  centers,  everything  that  stirred 
them  out  of  the  inevitable  stagnation  of  an  isolated 
village  existence.  The  pilot  was,  consequently,  in  every 
sense  an  anomaly,  a  privileged  person,  a  "sovereign." 
Not  only  did  he  receive  commands  from  nobody  but 
he  was  authorized  to  resent  even  the  merest  suggestion. 
"I  have  seen  a  boy  of  eighteen,"  Mark  Twain  tells  us, 


46      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

''taking  a  great  steamer  serenely  into  what  seemed 
almost  certain  destruction,  and  the  aged  captain  stand- 
ing mutely  by,  filled  with  apprehension  but  powerless 
to  interfere."  Pilots  were,  he  says,  "treated  with 
marked  deference  by  all,  officers  and  servants  and  pas- 
sengers," and  he  adds  naively:  "I  think  pilots  were 
about  the  only  people  I  ever  knew  who  failed  to  show, 
in  some  degree,  embarrassment  in  the  presence  of  travel- 
ing foreign  princes."  Above  all,  and  this  was  the 
anomaly  to  which  Mark  Twain,  after  many  years  of 
experience  in  American  society,  recurs  with  most  sig- 
nificant emphasis,  the  pilot  was  morally  free:  thanks 
to  the  indispensability  of  that  highly  skilled  vocation 
of  his,  he  and  he  alone  possessed  the  sole  condition  with- 
out which  the  creative  instinct  cannot  survive  and  grow. 
"A  pilot  in  those  days,"  he  says,  with  tragic  exaggera- 
tion, "was  the  only  unfettered  and  entirely  independent 
human  being  that  lived  in  the  earth.  Kings  are  but 
the  manacled  servants  of  parliaments  and  the  people 
.  .  .  the  editor  of  a  newspaper  .  .  .  clergymen  .  .  . 
writers  of  all  kinds  are  manacled  servants  of  the  public. 
We  write  frankly  and  fearlessly,  but  then  we  'modify' 
before  we  print.  In  truth,  every  man  and  woman  and 
child  has  a  master,  and  worries  and  frets  in  servitude ; 
but,  in  the  day  I  write  of,  the  Mississippi  pilot  had 
none." 

Can  we  not  see,  then,  how  inevitably  the  figure  of  the 
pilot  became  a  sort  of  channel  for  all  the  aesthetic 
idealism  of  the  Mississippi  region?  "When  1  was  a 
boy,"  Mark  Twain  says,  "there  was  but  one  permanent 
ambition  among  my  comrades  in  our  village.  That  was, 
to  be  a  steamboatman.  We  had  transient  ambitions  of 
other  sorts,  but  they  were  only  transient."  Think  of 
the  squalor  of  those  villages,  their  moral  and  material 
squalor,  their  dim  and  ice-bound  horizon,  their  petty 
taboos :  repression  at  one  extreme,  eruption  at  the  other, 
and  shiftlessness  for  a  golden  mean.  "You  can  hardly 


The  Candidate  for  Life          47 

imagine,"  said  Mark  Twain  once,  "you  can  hardly 
imagine  what  it  meant  to  a  boy  in  those  days,  shut  in 
as  we  were,  to  see  those  steamboats  pass  up  and  down." 
They  were  indeed  "floating  enchantments,"  beautiful, 
comely,  clean — first  rate,  for  once !  not  second,  or  third, 
or  fourth — light  and  bright  and  gay,  radiating  a  sort 
of  transcendent  self-respect,  magnetic  in  its  charm,  its 
cheerfulness,  its  trim  vigor.  And  what  an  air  they  had 
of  going  somewhere,  of  getting  somewhere,  of  knowing 
what  they  were  about,  of  having  an  orbit  of  their  own 
and  wilfully,  deliberately,  delightfully  pursuing  it! 
Stars,  in  short,  pillars  of  fire  in  that  baffling  twilight  of 
mediocrity,  nonentity,  cast-iron  taboos  and  catchpenny 
opportunism.  And  the  pilot !  Mark  Twain  tells  how  he 
longed  to  be  a  cabin  boy,  to  do  any  menial  work  about 
the  decks  in  order  to  serve  the  majestic  boats  and  their 
worthy  sovereigns.  Of  what  are  we  reminded  but  the 
breathless,  the  fructifying  adoration  of  a  young  ap- 
prentice in  the  atelier  of  some  great  master  of  the 
Renaissance?  And  we  are  right.  Mark  Twain's  soul 
is  that  of  the  artist,  and  what  we  see  unfolding  itself 
is  indeed  the  natural  passion  of  the  novice  lavished,  for 
love  of  the  metier,  upon  the  only  creative — shall  I  say? 
— at  least  the  only  purposive  figure  in  all  his  experience. 
Think  of  the  phrases  that  figure  evokes  in  "Life  on  the 
Mississippi":  "By  the  Shadow  of  Death,  but  he's  a 
lightning  pilot!"  It  was  in  this  fashion  that  comrades 
of  the  wheel  spoke  of  one  another.  "You  just  ought 
to  have  seen  him  take  this  boat  through  Helena  Cross- 
ing. I  never  saw  anything  so  gaudy  before.  And  if 
he  can  do  such  gold-leaf,  kid-glove,  diamond  breast-pin 
piloting  when  he  is  sound  asleep,  what  couldn't  he  do 
if  he  was  dead!"  The  adjectives  suggest  the  barbaric 
magnificence  of  the  pilot's  costume,  for  in  his  costume, 
too,  the  visible  sign  of  a  salary  as  great  as  that  of  the 
Vice-I' resident  of  the  United  States,  he  was  a  privileged 
person  But  the  accent  is  unmistakable.  It  is  an  outr 


48      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

burst  of  pure  aesthetic  emotion,  produced  by  a  supreme 
exercise  of  personal  craftsmanship. 

Mark  Twain  had  his  chance  at  last!  "I  wandered  for 
ten  years,"  he  said  in  later  life,  when  he  used  to  assert 
so  passionately  that  man  is  a  mere  chameleon,  who  takes 
his  color  from  his  surroundings,  a  passive  agent  of  his 
environment,  "I  wandered  for  ten  years,  under  the 
guidance  and  dictatorship  of  Circumstance.  .  .  .  Then 
Circumstance  arrived  with  another  turning-point  of  my 
life — a  new  link.  ...  I  had  made  the  acquaintance  of 
a  pilot  I  begged  him  to  teach  me  the  river,  and  he 
consented.  I  became  a  pilot."  He  had  come  to  believe 
that  he  had  drifted  into  piloting  and  out  of  it  quite  as 
aimlessly  as  he  had  drifted  into  and  out  of  so  many 
other  occupations.  But  that  hardly  bears  out  his  other 
assertion  that  to  be  a  pilot  was  the  "permanent  ambi- 
tion" of  his  childhood.  Two  instincts  had  impelled  him 
all  along,  the  instinct  to  seek  a  lucrative  and  respect- 
able position  of  which  his  mother  would  approve  and 
the  instinct  to  develop  himself  as  an  artist:  already  as 
a  printer  he  had  exhibited  an  enthusiastic  interest  in 
craftsmanship.  "He  was  a  rapid  learner  and  a  neat 
worker,"  we  are  told,  "a  good  workman,  faithful  and 
industrious;"  "he  set  a  clean  proof,"  his  brother  Orion 
said.  "Whatever  required  intelligence  and  care  and 
imagination,"  adds  Mr.  Paine,  of  those  printing  days, 
"was  given  to  Sam  Clemens."  He  had  naturally  gravi- 
tated, therefore,  toward  the  one  available  channel  that 
offered  him  the  training  his  artistic  instinct  required. 
And  the  proof  is  that  Mark  Twain,  in  order  to  take 
advantage  of  that  opportunity,  gladly  submitted  to  all 
manner  of  conditions  of  a  sort  that  he  was  wholly  un- 
willing to  submit  to  at  any  later  period  of  his  life. 

In  the  first  place,  he  had  no  money,  and  he  was  under 
a  powerful  compulsion  to  make  money  at  almost  any 
cost.  Yet,  in  order  to  pass  his  apprenticeship,  V  agreed 
not  only  to  forgo  all  remuneration  until  his  apprentice- 


The  Candidate  for  Life          49 

ship  was  completed,  but  to  find  somehow,  anyhow,  the 
five  hundred  dollars,  a  large  sum  indeed  for  him,  which 
was  the  price  of  his  tuition.  And  then,  most  striking 
fact  of  all,  he  took  pains,  endless,  unremitting  pains,  to 
make  himself  competent.  It  was  a  tremendous  task, 
how  tremendous  every  one  knows  who  has  read  "Life 
on  the  Mississippi":  "even  considering  his  old-time 
love  of  the  river  and  the  pilot's  trade,"  says  Mr.  Paine, 
"it  is  still  incredible  that  a  man  of  his  temperament 
could  have  persisted,  as  he  did,  against  such  obstacles." 
The  answer  is  to  be  found  only  in  the  fact  that,  em- 
barked as  he  was  at  last  on  a  career  that  called  su- 
premely for  self-reliance,  independence,  initiative,  judg- 
ment, skill,  his  nature  was  rapidly  crystallizing.  ' '  Sum 
all  the  gifts  that  man  is  endowed  with, ' '  he  writes  to  his 
brother  Orion,  "and  we  give  our  greatest  share  of  ad- 
miration to  his  energy.  And  to-day,  if  I  were  a  heathen, 
I  would  rear  a  statue  to  Energy,  and  fall  down  and 
worship  it !  I  want  a  man  to — I  want  you  to — take  up  a 
line  of  action,  and  follow  it  out,  in  spite  of  the  very 
devil. ' '  Is  this  the  Mark  Twain  who,  in  later  life,  read- 
ing in  Seutonius  of  one  Flavius  Clemens,  a  man  in  wide 
repute  "for  his  want  of  energy,"  wrote  on  the  margin 
of  the  book,  "I  guess  this  is  where  our  line  starts"? 

Mark  Twain  had  found  his  cue,  incredible  as  it  must 
have  seemed  in  that  shiftless  half-world  of  the  Missis- 
sippi, and  he  was  following  it  for  dear  life.  We  note 
in  him  at  this  time  an  entire  lack  of  the  humor  of  his 
later  days:  he  is  taut  as  one  of  the  hawsers  of  his  own 
boat;  he  is,  if  not  altogether  a  grave,  brooding  soul,  at 
least  a  frankly  poetic  one,  meditating  at  night  in  his 
pilot-house  on  "life,  death,  the  reason  of  existence,  of 
creation,  the  ways  of  Providence  and  Destiny, ' '  overflow- 
ing with  a  sense  of  power,  of  purpose,  of  direction,  of 
control.  "I  used  to  have  inspirations,"  he  said  once, 
"as  I  sat  there  alone  those  nights.  I  used  to  imagine  all 
sorts  of  situations  and  possibilities.  Those  things  got 


50      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

into  my  books  by  and  by  and  furnished  me  with  many 
a  chapter.  I  can  trace  the  effect  of  those  nights  through 
most  of  my  books  in  one  way  and  another."  He  who 
had  so  loathed  every  sort  of  intellectual  discipline,  who 
had  run  away  from  school  with  the  inevitability  of 
water  flowing  down  hill,  set  himself  to  study,  to  learn, 
with  a  passion  of  eagerness.  Earlier,  at  the  time  when 
he  had  picked  up  that  flying  leaf  from  the  life  of  Joan 
of  Arc,  he  had  suddenly  seized  the  moment's  inspiration 
to  study  Latin  and  German;  but  the  impulse  had  not 
lasted,  could  not  last.  Now,  however,  nothing  was  too 
difficult  for  him.  He  bought  text-books  and  applied 
himself  when  he  was  off  watch  and  in  port.  "The 
pilots, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine, ' '  regarded  him  as  a  great  reader 
— a  student  of  history,  travels,  literature,  and  the  sci- 
ences— a  young  man  whom  it  was  an  education  as  well 
as  an  entertainment  to  know." 

Mark  Twain  was  pressing  forward,  with  all  sails  set. 
"How  to  Take  Life"  is  the  subject  of  one  of  his  jot- 
tings: "Take  it  just  as  though  it  was — as  it  is — an  earn- 
est, vital,  and  important  affair.  Take  it  as  though  you 
were  born  to  the  task  of  performing  a  merry  part  in  it 
— as  though  the  world  had  waited  for  your  coming.  .  .  . 
Now  and  then  a  man  stands  aside  from  the  crowd,  labors 
earnestly,  steadfastly,  confidently,  and  straightway  be- 
comes famous  for  wisdom,  intellect,  skill,  greatness  of 
some  sort.  The  world  wonders,  admires,  idolizes,  and 
it  only  illustrates  what  others  may  do  if  they  take  hold 
of  life  with  a  purpose.  The  miracle  or  the  power  that 
elevates  the  few  is  to  be  found  in  their  industry,  appli- 
cation and  perseverance,  under  the  promptings  of  a 
brave,  determined  spirit." 

It  is  impossible  to  mistake  the  tone  of  this  juvenile 
sentiment :  it  is  the  emotion  of  a  man  who  feels  himself 
in  the  center  of  the  road  of  his  own  destiny. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  GILDED  AGE 

"The  American  democracy  follows  its  ascending  march,  uni> 
form,  majestic  as  the  laws  of  being,  sure  of  itself  as  the  decrees 
of  eternity." 

GEORGE  BANCROFT. 

YOU  conceive  this  valiant  spirit,  the  golden  thread 
in  his  hands,  feeling  his  way  with  firmer  grasp, 
with  surer  step,  through  the  dim  labyrinth  of  that  pio- 
neer world.  He  will  not  always  be  a  pilot;  he  is  an 
artist  born ;  some  day  he  is  going  to  be  a  writer.  And 
what  a  magnificent  nursery  for  his  talent  he  has  found 
at  last!  "In  that  brief,  sharp  schooling,"  he  said  once, 
"I  got  personally  and  familiarly  acquainted  with  all 
the  different  types  ef  human  nature  that  are  to  be 
found  in  fiction,  biography  or  history.  When  I  find 
a  well-drawn  character  in  fiction  or  biography,  I  gener- 
ally take  a  warm  personal  interest  in  him,  for  the  rea- 
son that  I  have  known  him  before — met  him  on  the 
river." 

Yes,  it  ought  to  serve  him  well,  that  experience,  it 
ought  to  equip  him  for  a  supreme  interpretation  of 
American  life ;  it  ought  to  serve  him  as  the  streets  of 
London  served  Dickens,  as  the  prison  life  of  Siberia 
served  Dostoievsky,  as  the  Civil  War  hospitals  served 
Whitman.  But  will  it?  Only  if  the  artist  in  him  can 
overcome  the  pioneer.  Those  great  writers  used  their 
experience  simply  as  grist  for  the  mill  of  a  profound 
personal  vision;  rising  above  it  themselves,  they  im- 


52      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

posed  upon  it  the  mold  of  their  own  individuality. 
Can  Mark  Twain  keep  the  golden  thread  in  his  hands 
long  enough?  As  a  pilot  he  is  not  merely  storing  his 
mind  with  knowledge  of  men  and  their  ways;  he  is 
forming  indispensable  habits  of  mind,  self-confidence, 
self-respect,  judgment,  workmanlike  behavior,  he  is  re- 
deeming his  moral  freedom.  But  has  he  quite  found 
himself,  has  his  nature  had  time  to  crystallize?  No, 
and  the  time  is  up.  Circumstance  steps  in  and  cuts  the 
golden  thread,  and  all  is  lost. 

The  Civil  War,  with  its  blockade  of  the  Mississippi, 
put  an  end  forever  to  the  glories  of  the  old  river  traffic. 
That  unique  career,  the  pilot's  career,  which  had  af- 
forded Mark  Twain  the  rudiments  of  a  creative  edu- 
cation, came  to  an  abrupt  end. 

Nothing  could  be  more  startling,  more  significant,  than 
the  change  instantly  registered  by  this  fact  in  Mark 
Twain 's  life.  What  happened  to  him  ?  He  has  told  us 
in  "The  Story  of  a  Campaign  That  Failed,"  that  ex- 
ceedingly dubious  episode  of  his  three  weeks'  career  as 
a  soldier  in  the  Confederate  Army.  Mark  Twain  was 
undoubtedly  right  in  feeling  that  he  had  no  cause  for 
shame  in  having  so  ignominiously  taken  up  arms  and  a 
military  title  only  to  desert  on  the  pretext  of  a  swollen 
ankle.  The  whole  story  simply  reflects  the  confusion 
and  misunderstanding  with  which,  especially  in  the 
border  States,  the  Civil  War  began.  What  it  does  re- 
veal, however,  is  a  singular  childishness,  a  sort  of  in- 
fantility, in  fact,  that  is  very  hard  to  reconcile  with  the 
character  of  any  man  of  twenty-six  and  especially  one 
who,  a  few  weeks  before,  had  been  a  river  "sovereign," 
the  master  of  a  great  steamboat,  a  worshiper  of  energy 
and  purpose,  in  short  the  Mark  Twain  we  have  just  seen. 
They  met,  that  amateur  battalion,  in  a  secret  place  on 
the  outskirts  of  Hannibal,  and  there,  says  Mr.  Paine, 
"they  planned  how  they  would  sell  their  lives  on  the 
field  of  glory  just  as  Tom  Sawyer's  band  might  have 


The  Gilded  Age  53 

done  if  it  had  thought  about  playing  'war'  instead  of 
'Indian'  and  'Pirate'  and  'Bandit'  with  fierce  raids  on 
peach  orchards  and  melon  patches."  Mark  Twain's 
brief  career  as  a  soldier  exhibited,  as  we  see,  just  the 
characteristics  of  a  ' '  throw-back, ' '  a  reversion  to  a  previ- 
ous infantile  frame  of  mind.  Was  the  apparent  control 
which  he  had  established  over  his  life  merely  illusory, 
then?  No,  it  was  real  enough  as  long  as  it  was  forti- 
fied by  the  necessary  conditions:  had  those  conditions 
continued  a  little  longer,  one  feels  certain,  that  self-con- 
trol would  have  become  organic  and  Mark  Twain  would 
never  have  had  to  deny ' '  free  will, ' '  would  never,  in  later 
years,  have  been  led  to  assert  so  passionately  that  man 
is  a  mere  chameleon.  But  the  habit  of  moral  independ- 
ence, of  self-determination,  was  so  new  to  this  man  who 
had  passed  his  whole  adolescence  in  his  mother's  leading- 
strings,  the  old,  dependent,  chaotic,  haphazard  pioneer 
instinct  of  his  childhood  so  deep-seated,  that  the  mo- 
ment these  fortifying  conditions  were  removed  he  slipped 
back  into  the  boy  he  had  been  before.  He  had  lost  his 
one  opportunity,  the  one  guideway  that  Western  life 
could  afford  the  artist  in  him.  For  four  years  his  life 
had  been  motivated  by  the  ideal  of  craftsmanship :  noth- 
ing stood  between  him  now  and  a  world  given  over  to 
exploitation. 

A  boy  just  out  of  school!  It  was  in  this  frame  of 
mind,  committing  himself  gaily  to  chance,  that  he  went 
West  with  his  brother  Orion  to  the  Nevada  gold-fields. 
One  recalls  the  tense,  passionate  young  figure  of  the 
pilot-house  exhorting  his  brother  to  "take  up  a  line  of 
action,  and  follow  it  out,  in  spite  of  the  very  devil," 
jotting  in  his  note-book  eager  and  confident  reflections 
on  the  duty  of  ' '  taking  hold  of  life  with  a  purpose. ' '  In 
these  words  from  ' '  Roughing  It, ' '  he  pictures  the  change 
in  his  mood :  ' '  Nothing  helps  scenery  like  ham  and  eggs. 
Ham  and  eggs,  and  after  these  a  pipe — an  old,  rank,  de- 
licious pipe — ham  and  eggs  and  scenery,  a  '  down-grade^' 


54      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

a  flying  coach,  a  fragrant  pipe,  and  a  contented  heart 
— these  make  happiness.  It  is  what  all  the  ages  have 
struggled  for."  A  down-grade,  going  West:  he  is 
"on  the  loose,"  you  see;  that  will,  that  purpose  have 
become  a  bore  even  to  think  about!  And  who  could 
wish  him  less  human  ?  Only  one  who  knows  the  fearful 
retribution  his  own  soul  is  going  to  exact  of  him.  He  is 
innocently,  frankly  yielding  himself  to  life,  unaware 
in  his  joyous  sense  of  freedom  that  he  is  no  longer  really 
free,  that  he  is  bound  once  more  by  all  the  compulsions 
of  his  childhood. 

But  now,  in  order  to  understand  what  happened  to 
Mark  Twain,  we  shall  have  to  break  the  thread  of  his 
personal  history.  "The  influences  about  [the  human  be- 
ing] , "  he  wrote,  years  later,  ' '  create  his  preferences,  his 
aversions,  his  politics,  his  tastes,  his  morals,  his  religion. 
He  creates  none  of  these  things  for  himself."  That,  as 
we  shall  see,  was  Mark  Twain 's  deduction  from  his  own 
life.  Consequently,  we  must  glance  now  at  the  epoch 
and  the  society  to  which,  at  this  critical  moment  of  his 
career,  he  was  so  gaily,  so  trustfully  committing  him- 
self. 

What  was  that  epoch  ?  It  was  the  round  half -century 
that  began  in  the  midst  of  the  Civil  War,  reached  its 
apogee  in  the  seventies  and  eighties  and  its  climacteric 
in  the  nineties  of  the  last  century,  with  the  beginning 
of  the  so-called  "Progressive  Movement,"  and  came  to 
an  indeterminate  conclusion,  by  the  kindness  of  heaven, 
shortly  before  the  war  of  1914.  It  was  the  epoch  of 
industrial  pioneering,  the  Gilded  Age,  as  Mark  Twain 
called  it  in  the  title  of  his  only  novel,  the  age  when 
presidents  were  business  men  and  generals  were  busi- 
ness men  and  preachers  were  business  men,  when  the 
whole  psychic  energy  of  the  American  people  was 
absorbed  in  the  exploitation  and  the  organization  of  the 
material  resources  of  the  continent  and  business  enter- 


The  Gilded  Age  55 

prise  was  virtually  the  only  recognized  sphere  of  action. 
One  recalls  the  career  of  Charles  Francis  Adams.  A 
man  of  powerful  individual  character,  he  was  certainly 
intended  by  nature  to  carry  on  the  traditions  of  dis- 
interested public  effort  he  had  inherited  from  three 
generations  of  ancestors.  Casting  about  for  a  career 
immediately  after  the  Civil  War,  however,  he  was  able 
to  find  in  business  alone,  as  he  has  told  us  in  his  Auto- 
biography, the  proper  scope  for  his  energies.  ' '  Survey- 
ing the  whole  field,"  he  says,  "instinctively  recognizing 
my  unfitness  for  the  law,  I  fixed  on  the  railroad  system 
as  the  most  developing  force  and  largest  field  of  the 
day,  and  determined  to  attach  myself  to  it."  And  how 
fully,  by  the  end  of  his  life,  he  had  come  to  accept  the 
values  of  his  epoch — in  spite  of  that  tell-tale  ' '  otherwise- 
mindediiess"  of  his — we  can  see  from  these  candid 
words :  ' '  As  to  politics,  it  is  a  game ;  art,  science,  litera- 
ture, we  know  how  fashions  change!  .  .  .  What  I  now 
find  I  would  really  have  liked  is  something  quite  differ- 
ent. I  would  like  to  have  accumulated — and  ample  and 
frequent  opportunity  for  so  doing  was  offered  me — 
one  of  those  vast  fortunes  of  the  present  day  rising  up 
into  the  tens  and  scores  of  millions — what  is  vulgarly 
known  as  'money  to  burn'  ...  I  would  like  to  be  the 
nineteenth  century  John  Harvard — the  Jolm-Harvard- 
of-the-Money-Bags,  if  you  will.  I  would  rather  be  that 
than  be  Historian  or  General  or  President." 

Less  than  ever,  then,  after  the  Civil  War,  can  Amer- 
ica be  said  to  have  offered  "a  career  open  to  all  talents." 
It  offered  only  one  career,  that  of  sharing  in  the  mate- 
rial development  of  the  continent.  Into  this  one  channel 
passed  all  the  religious  fervor  of  the  race. 

I  have  spoken  of  Mark  Twain's  novel.  It  is  not  a 
good  novel;  it  is,  artistically,  almost  an  unqualified 
failure.  And  yet,  as  inferior  works  often  do,  it  con- 
veys the  spirit  of  its  time;  it  tells,  that  is  to  say,  a 
story  which,  in  default  of  any  other  and  better,  might 


56      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

well  be  called  the  Odyssey  of  modern  America.  Philip 
Sterling,  the  hero,  is  in  love  with  Ruth  Bolton,  the 
daughter  of  a  rich  Quaker,  and  his  ambition  is  to  make 
money  so  that  he  may  marry  her  and  establish  a  home. 
Philip  goes  West  in  search  of  a  coal-mine.  He  is  baffled 
in  his  quest  again  and  again.  "He  still  had  faith  that 
there  was  coal  in  that  mountain.  He  had  made  a  pic- 
ture of  himself  living  there  a  hermit  in  a  shanty  by  the 
tunnel.  .  .  .  Perhaps  some  day — he  felt  it  must  be  so 
some  day — he  would  strike  coal.  But  what  if  he  did? 
Would  he  be  alive  to  care  for  it  then?  .  .  .  No,  a  man 
wants  riches  in  his  youth,  when  the  world  is  fresh  to 
him.  .  .  .  Philip  had  to  look  about  him.  He  was  like 
Adam:  the  world  was  all  before  him  where  to  choose." 
Routed  by  the  stubborn  mountain,  he  persists  in  his 
dream:  again  he  goes  back  to  it  and  toils  on.  "Three 
or  four  times  in  as  many  weeks  he  said  to  himself: 
'Am  I  a  visionary?  I  must  be  a  visionary!'  '  His 
workers  desert  him:  "after  that,  Philip  fought  his  bat- 
tle alone."  Once  more  he  begins  to  have  doubts :  "I  am 
conquered.  ...  I  have  got  to  give  it  up.  .  .  .  But  I  am 
not  conquered.  I  will  go  and  work  for  money,  and  come 
back  and  have  another  fight  with  fate.  Ah,  me,  it  may 
be  years,  it  may  be  years!"  And  then,  at  last,  when 
the  hour  is  blackest,  he  strikes  the  coal,  a  mountain  full 
of  it!  "Philip  in  luck,"  we  are  told,  "had  become 
suddenly  a  person  of  consideration,  whose  speech  was 
freighted  with  meaning,  whose  looks  were  all  significant. 
The  words  of  a  proprietor  of  a  rich  coal-mine  have  a 
golden  sound,  and  his  common  sayings  are  repeated  as 
if  they  were  solid  wisdom."  Triumphant,  Philip  goes 
back  to  Ruth,  and  they  are  married,  and  the  Gilded  Age 
is  justified  in  its  children. 

Am  I  wrong  in  suggesting  that  this  is  the  true  folk- 
Odyssey  of  our  civilization  ?  It  is  the  pattern,  one  might 
almost  say,  of  all  the  stories  of  modern  America;  and 
what  distinguishes  it  from  other  national  epopees  is 


The  Gilded  Age  57 

the  fact  that  all  its  idealism  runs  into  the  channel  of 
money-making.  Mr.  Lowes  Dickinson  once  commented 
on  the  truly  religious  character  of  American  business. 
* '  The  Gilded  Age ' '  enables  us  to  verify  that  observation 
at  the  source;  for  all  the  phenomena  of  religion  figure 
in  Philip's  search  for  the  coal-mine.  He  lives  in  the 
"faith"  of  discovering  it;  he  sees  himself  as  another 
"Adam,"  as  a  "hermit"  consecrated  to  that  cause;  he 
thinks  of  money  as  the  treasure  you  long  for  in  your 
youth  when  the  world  is  fresh  to  you ;  he  invokes  Provi- 
dence to  help  him  to  find  it;  he  speaks  of  himself,  in 
his  ardent  longing  for  it,  as  a  "visionary";  he  speaks 
of  "fighting  his  battle  alone,"  of  "another  fight  with 
fate."  This  is  not  mere  zeal,  one  observes,  not  the 
mere  zeal  of  the  mere  votary ;  it  is,  quite  specifically,  the 
religious  zeal  of  the  religious  votary.  And  as  Philip 
Sterling  is  to  himself  in  the  process,  so  he  is  to  others 
in  the  event :  ' '  The  words  of  a  proprietor  of  a  rich  coal- 
mine have  a  golden  sound,  and  his  common  sayings  are 
repeated  as  if  they  were  solid  wisdom."  The  hero,  in 
other  words,  has  become  the  prophet. 

We  can  see  now  that,  during  the  Gilded  Age  at  least, 
wealth  meant  to  Americans  something  else  than  mere 
material  possession,  and  the  pursuit  of  it  nothing  less 
than  a  sacred  duty.  One  might  note,  in  corroboration 
of  this,  an  interesting  passage  from  William  Roscoe 
Thayer's  "Life  and  Letters  of  John  Hay": 


That  you  have  property  is  proof  of  industry  and  foresight  on 
your  part  or  your  father's;  that  you  have  nothing,  is  a  judg- 
ment on  your  laziness  and  vices,  or  on  your  improvidence.  The 
world  is  a  moral  world,  which  it  would  not  be  if  virtue  and  vice 
received  the  same  rewards.  This  summary,  though  confessedly 
crude,  may  help,  if  it  be  not  pushed  too  close,  to  define  John 
Hay's  position.  The  property  you  own — be  it  a  tiny  cottage  or  a 
palace — means  so  much  more  than  the  tangible  object!  With  it 
are  bound  up  whatever  in  historic  times  has  stood  for  Civilization. 
So  an  attack  on  Property  becomes  an  attack  on  Civilization. 


58      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Here,  surely,  we  have  one  of  those  supremely  char- 
acteristic utterances  that  convey  the  note  of  whole 
societies.  That  industry  and  foresight  are  the  cardinal 
virtues,  that  virtue  and  vice  are  to  be  distinguished 
not  by  any  intrinsic  spiritual  standard  but  by  their 
comparative  results  in  material  wealth,  that  the  insti- 
tution of  private  property  is  "bound  up"  with  "what- 
ever in  historic  times  has  stood  for  Civilization, " 
barring,  of  course,  the  teachings  of  Jesus  and  Buddha 
and  Francis  of  Assisi,  and  most  of  the  art,  thought  and 
literature  of  the  world,  is  a  doctrine  that  can  hardly 
seem  other  than  eccentric  to  any  one  with  a  sense  of 
the  history  of  the  human  spirit.  Yet  it  was  the  social 
creed  of  John  Hay,  and  John  Hay  was  not  even  a  busi- 
ness man;  he  was  a  poet  and  a  man  of  letters.  "When 
Tolstoy  said  that  "property  is  not  a  law  of  nature,  the 
will  of  God,  or  a  historical  necessity,  but  rather  a  super- 
stition, '  *  he  was  expressing,  in  a  somewhat  extreme  form, 
the  general  view  of  thinkers  and  poets  and  even  of 
economists  during  these  latter  years,  a  view  the  imagina- 
tive mind  can  hardly  do  other  than  hold.  It  is  very 
significant,  therefore,  to  find  American  men  of  letters 
opposing,  by  this  insistence  upon  the  supremacy  of 
material  values,  what  must  have  been  their  own  normal 
personal  instinct  as  well  as  the  whole  tendency  of  mod- 
ern liberal  culture — for  John  Hay  was  far  from  unique ; 
even  Walt  Whitman  said:  "Democracy  looks  with  suspi- 
cious, ill-satisfied  eye  upon  the  very  poor  and  on  those 
out  of  business;  she  asks  for  men  and  women  with 
occupations,  well-off,  owners  of  houses  and  acres,  and 
with  cash  in  the  bank."  Industry  and  foresight,  de- 
voted to  the  pursuit  of  wealth — here  one  has  at  once 
the  end  and  the  means  of  the  simple,  universal  morality 
of  the  Gilded  Age.  And  he  alone  was  justified,  to  him 
alone  everything  was  forgiven,  who  succeeded.  "The 
following  dialogue,"  wrote  Dickens,  in  his  "American 
Notes,"  "I  have  held  a  hundred  times:  'Is  it  not  a  very 


The  Gilded  Age  59 

disgraceful  circumstance  that  such  a  man  ?s  So-and-so 
should  be  acquiring  a  large  property  by  the  most  in- 
famous and  odious  means,  and  notwithstanding  all  the 
crimes  of  which  he  has  been  guilty,  should  be  tolerated 
and  abetted  by  your  citizens?  He  is  a  public  nuisance, 
is  he  not?'  'Yes,  sir.'  'A  convicted  liar?'  'Yes,  sir.' 
'He  has  been  kicked,  and  cuffed,  and  caned?'  -'Yes, 
sir.'  'And  he  is  utterly  dishonorable,  debased  and  prof- 
ligate?' 'Yes,  sir.'  'In  the  name  of  wonder,  then, 
what  is  his  merit?'  'Well,  sir,  he  is  a  smart  man.'  ' 
Smartness  was  indeed,  for  the  Gilded  Age,  the  divine 
principle  that  moved  the  sun  and  the  other  stars. 

We  cannot  understand  this  mood,  this  creed,  this 
morality  unless  we  realize  that  the  business  men  of  the 
generation  after  the  Civil  War  were,  essentially,  still 
pioneers  and  that  all  their  habits  of  thought  were  the 
fruits  of  the  exigencies  of  pioneering.  The  whole  coun- 
try was,  in  fact,  engaged  in  a  vast  crusade  that  required 
an  absolute  homogeneity  of  feeling :  almost  every  Ameri- 
can family  had  some  sort  of  stake  in  the  West  and 
acquiesced  naturally,  therefore,  in  that  worship  of  suc- 
cess, that  instinctive  belief  that  there  was  something 
sacred  in  the  pursuit  of  wealth  without  which  the 
pioneers  themselves  could  hardly  have  survived.  With- 
out the  chance  of  an  indeterminate  financial  reward, 
they  would  never  have  left  their  homes  in  the  East  or 
in  Europe,  without  it  they  could  never,  under  the  im- 
mensely difficult  conditions  they  encountered,  have 
transformed,  as  they  so  often  did,  the  spirit  of  adventure 
into  the  spirit  of  perseverance.  What  kept  them  up  if  it 
was  not  the  hope,  hardly  of  a  competence,  but  of  great 
wealth?  Faith  in  the  possibility  of  a  lucky  strike,  the 
fact  that  immeasurable  riches  lay  before  some  of  them 
at  least,  that  the  mountains  were  fall  of  gold  and  the 
lands  of  oil,  that  great  cities  were  certainly  destined  to 
rise  up  some  day  in  this  wilderness,  that  4:hese  fertile 
territories,  these  great  rivers,  these  rich  forests  lay  there 


60      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

brimming  over  with  fortune  for  a  race  to  come — that 
vision  was  ever  in  their  minds.  And  since  through 
private  enterprise  alone  could  that  consummation  ever 
come — for  the  group-spirit  of  the  colonist  had  not  been 
bred  in  the  American  nature — private  enterprise  be- 
came for  the  pioneer  a  sort  of  obligation  to  the  society 
of  the  future;  some  instinct  told  him,  to  the  steady 
welfare  of  his  self-respect,  that  in  serving  himself  well 
he  was  also  serving  America.  To  the  pioneer,  in  short, 
private  and  public  interests  were  identical  and  the  wor- 
ship of  success  was  actually  a  social  cult. 

It  was  a  crusade,  I  say,  and  it  required  an  absolute 
homogeneity  of  feeling.  We  were  a  simple,  homogeneous 
folk  before  the  Civil  War  and  the  practical  effect  of 
pioneering  and  the  business  regime  was  to  keep  us  so, 
to  prevent  any  of  that  differentiation,  that  evolution  of 
the  homogeneous  into  the  heterogeneous  which,  since 
Herbert  Spencer  stated  it,  has  been  generally  conceived 
as  the  note  of  true  human  progress.  The  effect  of  busi- 
ness upon  the  individual  has  never  been  better  described 
than  in  these  words  of  Charles  Francis  Adams:  "I 
have  known,  and  known  tolerably  well,  a  good  many 
'successful'  men — 'big'  financially — men  famous  during 
the  last  half-century;  and  a  less  interesting  crowd  I  do 
not  care  to  encounter.  Not  one  that  I  have  ever  known 
would  I  care  to  meet  again,  either  in  this  world  or  the 
next;  nor  is  one  of  them  associated  in  my  mind  with 
the  idea  of  humor,  thought  or  refinement.  A  set  of 
mere  money-getters  and  traders,  they  were  essentially 
unattractive  and  uninteresting."  Why  this  is  so  Mr. 
Herbert  Croly  has  explained  in  "The  Promise  of  Ameri- 
can Life":  "A  man's  individuality  is  as  much  Com- 
promised by  success  under  the  conditions  imposed  by 
such  a  system  as  it  is  by  failure.  His  actual  occupation 
may  tend  to  make  his  individuality  real  and  fruitful; 
but  the  quality  of  the  work  is  determined  by  a  merely 
acquisitive  motive,  and  the  man  himself  thereby  usually 


The  Gilded  Age  61 

debarred  from  obtaining  any  edifying  personal  inde- 
pendence or  any  peculiar  personal  distinction.  Differ- 
ent as  American  business  men  are  one  from  another  r 
temperament,  circumstances  and  habits,  they  have  a 
way  of  becoming  fundamentally  very  much  alike.  Their 
individualities  are  forced  into  a  common  mold,  be- 
cause the  ultimate  measure  of  the  value  of  their  work 
is  the  same,  and  is  nothing  but  its  results  in  cash." 
Such  is  the  result  of  the  business  process,  and  the  suc- 
cess of  the  process  required,  during  the  epoch  of  indus- 
trial pioneering,  a  virtually  automatic  sacrifice  of  almost 
everything  that  makes  individuality  significant.  "You 
no  longer  count"  is  the  motto  a  French  novelist  has 
drawn  from  the  European  war :  he  means  that,  in  order 
to  attain  the  collective  goal,  the  individual  must  neces- 
sarily submerge  himself  in  the  collective  mind,  that  the 
mental  uniform  is  no  less  indispensable  than  the  physi- 
cal. It  was  so  in  America,  in  the  Gilded  Age.  The  mere 
assertion  of  individuality  was  a  menace  to  the  integrity 
of  what  is  called  the  herd:  how  much  more  so  that 
extreme  form  of  individuality,  the  creative  spirit,  whose 
whole  tendency  is  sceptical,  critical,  realistic,  disruptive ! 
"It  is  no  wonder,  consequently,"  as  Mr.  Croly  says, 
"that  the  pioneer  democracy  viewed  with  distrust  and 
aversion  the  man  with  a  special  vocation  and  high  stand- 
ards of  achievement."  In  fact,  one  was  required  not 
merely  to  forgo  one's  individual  tastes  and  beliefs  and 
ideas  but  positively  to  cry  up  the  beliefs  and  tastes 
of  the  herd. 

For  it  was  not  enough  for  the  pioneers  to  suppress 
those  influences  that  were  hostile  to  their  immediate 
efficiency:  they  were  obliged  also  to  romanticize  their 
situation.  Solitary  as  they  were,  or  at  best  united  in 
feeble  groups  against  overwhelming  odds,  how  could 
they  have  carried  out  their  task  if  they  had  not  been 
blinded  to  the  difficulties,  the  hideousness  of  it?  The 
myth  of  "manifest  destiny,"  the  America  Myth,  as  one 


62      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

might  call  it,  what  was  it  but  an  immense  rose-colored 
veil  the  pioneers  threw  over  the  continent  in  order  that 
it  might  be  developed?  Never  were  there  such  illu- 
sionists :  they  were  like  men  in  a  chloroform  dream,  and 
it  was  happily  so,  for  that  chloroform  was  indeed  an 
anesthetic.  Without  the  feeling  that  they  were  the 
children  of  destiny,  without  the  social  dream  that  some 
vast  boon  to  humanity  hung  upon  their  enterprise,  with- 
out the  personal  dream  of  immeasurable  success  for 
themselves,  who  would  ever  have  endured  such  volun- 
tary hardships?  One  recalls  poor  John  Clemens,  Mark 
Twain's  father,  absorbed  in  a  perpetual  motion  machine 
that  was  to  save  mankind,  no  doubt,  and  bring  its  in- 
ventor millions.  One  recalls  that  vision  of  the  "Ten- 
nessee land"  that  buoyed  up  the  spirit  of  Squire 
Hawkins,  even  while  it  brought  him  wretchedness  and 
death.  As  for  Colonel  Sellers,  who  was  so  intoxicated 
with  dreams  of  fortune  that  he  had  lost  all  sense  of  the 
distinction  between  reality  and  illusion,  he  is  indeed 
the  archtypical  American  of  the  pioneering  epoch.  One 
remembers  him  in  his  miserable  shanty  in  the  Tennessee 
wilds,  his  wife  worn  to  the  bone,  his  children  half  naked 
and  half  starved,  the  carpetless  floor,  the  picturoless 
walls,  the  crazy  clock,  the  battered  stove.  To  Colonel 
Sellers  that  establishment  is  a  feudal  castle,  his  wife  is 
a  chateleine,  his  children  the  baron's  cubs,  and  when 
he  lights  the  candle  and  places  it  behind  the  isinglass 
of  the  broken  stove,  is  it  not  to  him,  indeed  and  in 
truth,  the  hospitable  blaze  upon  the  hearth  of  the  great 
hall?  To  such  a  degree  has  the  promoter's  instinct,  the 
"wish"  of  the  advertiser,  taken  possession  of  his  brain 
that  he  already  sees  in  the  barren  stretch  of  land  about 
him  the  city  which  is  destined  some  day  to  rise  up  thero. 
The  vision  of  the  material  opportunities  among  which 
he  lives  has  supplanted  his  reason  and  his  five  senses 
and  obliterated  in  his  eyes  the  whole  aspect  of  reality. 
The  pioneers,  in  fact,  had  not  only  to  submit  to  these 


The  Gilded  Age  63 

illusions  but  to  propagate  them.  A  story  Mark  Twain 
used  to  tell,  the  story  of  Jim  Gillis  and  the  California 
plums,  is  emblematic  of  this.  Jim  Gillis,  the  original  of 
Bret  Harte's  "Truthful  James,"  was  a  miner  to  whose 
solitary  cabin  in  the  Tuolumne  hills  Mark  Twain  and 
his  friends  used  to  resort.  One  day  an  old  squaw  came 
along  selling  some  green  plums.  One  of  the  men  care- 
lessly remarked  that  while  these  plums,  "California 
plums,"  might  be  all  right  he  had  never  heard  of  any 
one  eating  them.  "There  was  no  escape  after  that," 
says  Mr.  Paine;  "Jim  had  to  buy  some  of  those  plums, 
whose  acid  was  of  the  hair-lifting,  aqua-fortis  variety, 
and  all  the  rest  of  the  day  he  stewed  them,  adding  sugar, 
trying  to  make  them  palatable,  tasting  them  now  and 
then,  boasting  meanwhile  of  their  nectar-like  delicious- 
ness.  He  gave  the  others  a  taste  by  and  by — a  wither- 
ing, corroding  sup — and  they  derided  him  and  rode  him 
down.  But  Jim  never  weakened.  He  ate  that  fearful 
brew,  and  though  for  days  his  mouth  was  like  fire  he 
still  referred  to  the  luscious,  health-giving  joys  of  the 
'California'  plums."  How  much  of  the  romanticism 
of  the  pioneers  there  is  in  that  story !  It  was  the  same 
over-determination  that  led  them  to  call  their  settle- 
ments by  such  names  as  Eden,  like  that  wretched 
swamp-hamlet  in  ' '  Martin  Chuzzlewit, ' '  that  made  them 
inveigle  prospectors  and  settlers  with  utterly  menda- 
cious pictures  of  their  future,  that  made  it  obligatory 
upon  every  one  to  "boost,  not  knock,"  a  slogan  still  of 
absolute  authority  in  certain  parts  of  the  West. 

Behind  this  tendency  the  nation  was  united  as  a  solid 
block:  it  would  not  tolerate  anything  that  attacked  the 
ideal  of  success,  that  made  the  country  seem  unattrac- 
tive or  the  future  uncertain.  Every  sort  of  criticism, 
in  fact,  was  regarded  as  lese-majcste  to  the  folk-spirit 
of  America,  and  no  traveler  from  abroad,  however  fair- 
minded,  could  tell  the  truth  about  us  without  jeopardiz- 
ing his  life,  liberty  and  reputation.  "Who  does  not 


64      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

remember  the  story  of  Dickens 's  connection  with  Amer- 
ica, the  still  more  notable  story  of  the  good  Captain 
Basil  Hall  who,  simply  because  he  mentioned  in  print 
some  of  the  less  attractive  traits  of  pioneer  life,  was 
publicly  accused  of  being  an  agent  of  the  British  gov- 
ernment on  a  special  mission  to  blacken  and  defame  this 
country?  Merely  to  describe  facts  as  they  were  was 
regarded  as  a  sort  of  treachery  among  a  people  who, 
having  next  to  no  intellectual  interest  in  the  truth,  had, 
on  the  other  hand,  a  strong  emotional  interest  in  the 
perversion  of  it.  An  American  who  went  abroad  and 
stayed,  without  an  official  excuse,  more  than  a  reason- 
able time,  was  regarded  as  a  turncoat  and  a  deserter; 
if  he  remained  at  home  he  was  obliged  to  accept  the 
uniform  on  pain  of  being  called  a  crank  and  of  actually, 
by  the  psychological  law  that  operates  in  these  cases, 
becoming  one.  There  is  no  type  in  our  social  history 
more  significant  than  that  ubiquitous  figure,  the  "village 
atheist."  One  recalls  Judge  Driscoll  in  "Pudd'nhead 
Wilson,"  the  president  of  the  Free-Thinkers'  Society  of 
which  Pudd'nhead  was  the  only  other  member.  "Judge 
Driscoll,"  says  Mark  Twain,  "could  be  a  free-thinker 
and  still  hold  his  place  in  society,  because  he  was  the 
person  of  most  consequence  in  the  community,  and  there- 
fore could  venture  to  go  his  own  way  and  follow  out 
his  own  notions."  No  respect  for  independence  and 
individuality,  in  short,  entitled  a  man  to  regulate  his 
own  views  on  life ;  quite  on  the  contrary,  that  was  the 
privilege  solely  of  those  who,  having  proved  themselves 
superlatively  "smart,"  were  able  to  take  it,  as  it  were, 
by  force.  If  you  could  out-pioneer  the  pioneers,  you 
could  wrest  the  possession  of  your  own  mind:  by  that 
time,  in  any  case,  it  was  usually  so  soured  and  warped 
and  embittered  as  to  have  become  safely  impotent. 

As  we  can  see  now,  a  vast  unconscious  conspiracy 
actuated  all  America  against  the  creative  spirit.  In  an 
age  when  every  sensitive  mind  in  England  was  in  full 


The  Gilded  Age  65 

revolt  against  the  blind,  mechanical,  devastating  forces 
of  a  "progress"  that  promised  nothing  but  the  ultimate 
collapse  of  civilization ;  when  all  Europe  was  alive  with 
prophets,  aristocratic  prophets,  proletarian  prophets, 
religious  and  philosophical  and  humanitarian  and  eco- 
nomic and  artistic  prophets,  crying  out,  in  the  name 
of  the  human  spirit,  against  the  obscene  advance  of 
capitalistic  industrialism ;  in  an  age  glorified  by  nothing 
but  the  beautiful  anger  of  the  Tolstoys  and  the  Marxes, 
the  Nietzsches  and  the  Renans,  the  Ruskins  and  the 
Morrises — in  that  age  America,  innocent,  ignorant, 
profoundly  untroubled,  slept  the  righteous  sleep  of  its 
own  manifest  and  peculiar  destiny.  We  were,  in  fact, 
in  our  provincial  isolation,  in  just  the  state  of  the 
Scandinavian  countries  during  the  European  wars  of 
1866-1870,  as  George  Brandes  describes  it  in  his  auto- 
biography: "While  the  intellectual  life  languished,  as 
a  plant  droops  in  a  close,  confined  place,  the  people  were 
self-satisfied.  They  rested  on  their  laurels  and  fell  into 
a  doze.  And  while  they  dozed  they  had  dreams.  The 
cultivated,  and  especially  the  half-cultivated,  public  in 
Denmark  and  Norway  dreamed  that  they  were  the  salt 
of  Europe.  They  dreamed  that  by  their  idealism  they 
would  regenerate  the  foreign  nations.  They  dreamed 
that  they  were  the  free,  mighty  North,  which  would  lead 
the  cause  of  the  peoples  to  victory — and  they  woke  up 
unfree,  impotent,  ignorant." 

Yes,  even  New  England,  the  old  home  of  so  many 
brave  and  virile  causes,  even  New  England,  which  had 
cared  so  much  for  the  freedom  of  the  individual,  had' 
ceased  to  afford  any  stimulus  or  any  asylum  for  the 
human  spirit.  New  England  had  been  literally  emascu- 
lated by  the  Civil  War,  or  rather  by  the  exodus  of 
young  men  westward  which  was  more  or  less  synchron- 
ous with  the  war.  The  continent  had  been  opened  up, 
the  rural  population  of  the  East  had  been  uprooted, 
had  been  set  in  motion,  had  formed  habits  of  wander- 


66      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ing.  The  war,  like  a  fever,  had  as  it  were  stimulated 
the  circulation  of  the  race,  and  we  might  say  that  by  a 
natural  attraction  the  blood  of  the  head,  which  New 
England  had  been,  had  flowed  into  those  remote  mem- 
bers, the  Western  territories. 

In  "Houghing  It,"  Mark  Twain  has  pictured  the 
population  of  the  gold-fields.  "It  was  a  driving,  vigor- 
ous, restless  population  in  those  days,"  he  says.  "It 
was  an  assemblage  of  two  hundred  thousand  young  men 
— not  simpering,  dainty,  kid-glove  weaklings,  but  stal- 
wart, muscular,  dauntless  young  braves,  brimful  of  push 
and  energy,  and  royally  endowed  with  every  attribute 
that  goes  to  make  up  a  peerless  and  magnificent  man- 
hood— the  very  pick  and  choice  of  the  world's  glorious 
ones.  No  women,  no  children,  no  gray  and  stooping 
veterans — none  but  erect,  bright-eyed,  quick-moving, 
strong-handed  young  giants.  ...  It  was  a  splendid 
population,  for  all  the  slow,  sleepy,  sluggish-brained 
sloths  stayed  at  home — you  never  find  that  sort  of  people 
among  pioneers."  Those  gold-fields  of  the  West!  One 
might  almost  imagine  that  Nature  itself  was  awake  and 
conscious,  and  not  only  awake  but  shrewd  and  calcu- 
lating, to  have  placed  such  a  magnet  there  at  the  farth- 
est edge  of  the  continent  in  order  to  captivate  the  highest 
imaginations,  in  order  to  draw,  swiftly,  fatefully,  over 
that  vast,  forbidding  intervening  space,  a  population 
hardy  enough,  inventive  enough,  poetic  enough  if  not 
to  conquer  and  subdue  at  least  to  cover  it  and  stake  the 
claims  of  the  future.  But  what  was  the  result?  One 
is  often  told  by  New  Englanders  who  were  children  in 
the  years  just  after  the  war  how  the  young  men  left  the 
towns  and  villages  never  to  return.  And  has  not  a 
whole  school  of  story-writers  and,  more  recently,  of 
poets,  familiarized  us  with  the  life  of  this  New  England 
countryside  during  the  generation  that  followed — those 
villages  full  of  old  maids  and  a  few  tattered  remnants 
of  the  male  sex,  the  less  vigorous,  the  less  intelligent,  a 


The  Gilded  Age  67 

population  only  half  sane  owing  to  solitude  and  the 
decay  of  social  interests?  What  a  civilization  they  pic- 
ture, those  novels  and  those  poems! — a  civilization  rid- 
dled with  neurasthenia,  madness  and  mental  death. 
Christian  Science  was  as  characteristic  an  outgrowth  of 
this  generation  as  abolition  and  perfectionism,  philoso- 
phy and  poetry,  all  those  manifestations  of  a  surplus  of 
psychic  energy,  had  been  of  the  generation  before.  New 
England,  in  short,  and  with  New  England  the  whole 
spiritual  life  of  the  nation,  had  passed  into  the  condition 
of  a  neurotic  anaemia  in  which  it  has  remained  so 
largely  to  this  day. 

This  explains  the  notorious  petrifaction  of  Boston, 
that  petrifaction  of  its  higher  levels  which  was  illus- 
trated in  so  tragi-comic  a  way  by  the  unhappy  episode 
of  Mark  Twain's  "Whittier  Birthday  speech.  It  was  not 
the  fault  of  those  gently  charming  men,  Emerson  and 
Longfellow  and  Dr.  Holmes,  that  he  was  mad0  to  feel, 
in  his  own  phrase,  "like  a  barkeeper  in  heaven."  They 
had  no  wish  to  be,  or  to  appear,  like  graven  idols;  it 
was  the  subsidence  of  the  flood  of  life  beneath  them 
that  had  left  them  high  and  dry  as  the  ark  on  Ararat. 
They  continued,  survivals  as  they  were  of  a  happier  age 
when  a  whole  outlying  population  had  in  a  measure 
shared  their  creative  impulses,  to  nod  and  smile,  to  think 
and  dream,  just  as  if  nothing  had  happened.  They  were 
not  offended  by  Mark  Twain's  unlucky  wit:  Boston  was 
offended,  Boston  which,  no  longer  open  to  the  winds  of 
impulse  and  desire,  cherished  these  men  as  the  symbols 
of  an  extinct  cause  that  had  grown  all  the  more  sacro- 
sanct in  their  eyes  the  less  they  participated  in  it.  For 
tha  real  forces  of  Boston  society  had  gone  the  way  of 
all  flesh.  The  Brahmins  and  the  sons  of  the  Brahmins 
had  not  followed  bodily  in  the  path  of  the  pioneers,  but 
they  had  followed  them,  discreetly,  in  spirit ;  they  saved 
their  faces  by  remaining,  like  Charles  Francis  Adams, 
"otherwise-minded,"  but  they  bought  up  land  in  Kan- 


68      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

sas  City  just  the  same.  In  a  word,  the  last  stronghold 
of  the  stiff-necked  and  free-minded  masculine  individual- 
ism of  the  American  past  had  capitulated  to  the  golden 
eagle:  literature,  culture,  the  conservation  of  the  ideal 
had  passed  into  the  hands  of  women.  Ah,  it  was  not 
women  only,  not  the  sort  of  women  who  had  so  often 
tended  the  bright  light  of  literature  in  France !  It  was 
the  sad,  ubiquitous  spinster,  left  behind  with  her  own 
desiccated  soul  by  the  stampede  of  the  young  men  west- 
ward. New  England  had  retained  its  cultural  hegemony 
by  default,  and  the  New  England  spinster,  with  her 
restricted  experience,  her  complicated  repressions,  and 
all  her  glacial  taboos  of  good  form,  had  become  the 
pacemaker  in  the  arts. 

One  cannot  but  see  in  Mr.  Howells  the  predestined 
figurehead  of  this  new  regime.  It  was  the  sign  of  the 
decay  of  artistic  vitality  in  New  England  that  the  old 
literary  Brahmins  were  obliged  to  summon  a  Westerner 
to  carry  on  their  apostolic  succession,  for  Mr.  Howells, 
the  first  alien  editor  of  The  Atlantic  Monthly,  was 
consecrated  to  the  high  priesthood  by  an  all  but  literal 
laying  on  of  hands;  and  certainly  Mr.  Howells,  already 
intimidated  by  the  prestige  of  Boston,  was  a  singularly 
appropriate  heir.  He  has  told  us  in  his  autobiography 
how,  having  as  a  young  reporter  in  Ohio  stumbled  upon 
a  particularly  sordid  tragedy,  he  resolved  ever  after 
to  avert  his  eyes  from  the  darker  side  of  life — an  inci- 
dent that  throws  rather  a  glaring  light  upon  what  later 
became  his  prime  dogma,  that  "the  more  smiling  aspects 
of  life  are  the  more  American":  the  dogma,  as  we  see, 
was  merely  a  rationalization  of  his  own  unconscious 
desire  neither  to  see  in  America  nor  to  say  about  Amer- 
ica anything  that  Americans  in  general  did  not  wish 
to  have  seen  or  said.  His  confessed  aim  was  to  reveal 
the  charm  of  the  commonplace,  an  essentially  passive 
and  feminine  conception  of  his  art ;  and  while  his  super- 
ficial realism  gave  him  the  sanction  of  modernity,  it  dis- 


The  Gilded  Age  69 

pensed  him  at  the  same  time  from  any  of  those  drastic 
imaginative  reconstructions  of  life  and  society  that  are 
of  the  essence  of  all  masculine  fiction.  In  short,  he  had 
attained  a  thoroughly  denatured  point  of  view  and  one 
nicely  adapted  to  an  age  that  would  not  tolerate  any 
assault  upon  the  established  fact:  meanwhile,  the  emi- 
nence of  his  position  and  his  truly  beautiful  and  dis- 
tinguished talent  made  him  what  Mark  Twain  called 
"the  critical  Court  of  Last  Kesort  in  this  country,  from 
whose  decision  there  is  no  appeal. ' '  The  spokesman,  the 
mild  and  submissive  dictator  of  an  age  in  which  women 
wrote  half  the  books  and  formed  the  greater  part  of 
the  reading  public,  he  diffused  far  and  wide  the  notion 
of  the  artist's  role  through  which  he  had  found  his  own 
salvation,  a  notion,  that  is  to  say,  which  accepted  im- 
plicitly the  religious,  moral  and  social  taboos  of  the 
time. 

I  have  said  that,  during  this  epoch,  a  vast  unconscious1 
conspiracy  actuated  ail  America  against  the  creative  life. 
For  is  it  not  plain  now  that  the  cultural  domination  of 
this  emasculated  New  England  simply  played  into  the 
hands  of  the  business  regime?  The  taboos  of  the  one 
supported,  in  effect,  the  taboos  of  the  other:  the  public 
opinion  of  both  sexes  and  of  all  classes,  East  and  West 
alike,  formed  a  closed  ring  as  it  were  against  any  mani- 
festation of  the  vital,  restless,  critical,  disruptive  spirit 
of  artistic  individuality.  It  was  this,  and  not  the  fact, 
or  the  illusion,  that  America  was  a  "young"  country, 
that  impelled  Henry  James  and  Whistler,  and  virtually 
every  other  American  who  possessed  a  vital  sense  of 
the  artistic  vocation,  to  seek  what  necessarily  became 
an  exotic  development  in  Europe.  It  was  this  that  drove 
Walt  Whitman  into  his  lair  at  Camden,  where  he  lived 
at  bay  during  the  rest  of  his  life,  carrying  on  a  per- 
petual guerrilla  warfare  against  the  whole  literary  con- 
fraternity of  the  age.  It  was  this,  we  may  assume,  that 
led  John  Hay  to  publish  "The  Breadwinners"  anony- 


yo      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

mously,  and  Henry  Adams  his  novel,  "Democracy." 
With  the  corruption,  the  vulgarity,  the  vapidity  of 
American  life  these  men  were  completely  disillusioned, 
but  motives  of  self-preservation,  motives  that  would 
certainly  not  have  operated  in  men  of  a  corresponding 
type  before  the  Civil  War,  restrained  them  from  impair- 
ing, by  strong  assertions  of  individual  judgment,  "the 
consistency  of  feeling  upon  which  the  pioneers  rightly 
placed  such  a  high  value."  The  tradition  of  literary 
independence  had  never  been  strong  in  America;  that 
the  artist  and  the  thinker  are  types  whose  integrity  is 
vital  to  society  and  who  are  under  a  categorical  impera- 
tive to  pursue  their  vocation  frankly  and  disinterestedly 
was  an  idea  that  had  entered  scarcely  a  dozen  American 
minds;  our  authors  generally  had  accepted  the  com- 
placent dictum  of  William  Cullen  Bryant  that  literature 
is  "a  good  staff  but  a  bad  crutch,"  not  a  vocation,  in 
short,  but  an  avocation.  A  few  desperate  minds  justi- 
fied themselves  by  representing  the  artist  as  a  sort  of 
glorified  Methodist  minister  and  reacted  so  far  from 
the  prevailing  materialism  as  to  say  that  art  was  under 
a  divine  sanction :  we  can  see  from  the  letters  of  George 
Inness  and  Sidney  Lanier  how  these  poor  men,  these 
admirable  and  sincere  men,  allowed  themselves  to  be 
devoured  by  theory.  In  general,  however,  the  new  dis- 
pensation bred  a  race  of  writers  who  accommodated 
themselves  instinctively  to  the  exigencies  of  an  age  that 
required  a  rigicTconformity  in  spirit,  while  maintaining, 
as  a  sop  to  Cerberus,  a  highly  artistic  tradition  in 
form. 

Thus,  save  for  the  voice  of  the  machine,  the  whole 
nation  was  quiescent :  no  specter  intruded  upon  the  jolly 
family  party  of  prosperous  America;  there  was  no  one 
to  gainsay  its  blind  and  innocent  longing  for  success, 
for  prestige,  for  power.  Mr.  Meredith  Nicholson  lately 
wrote  a  glowing  eulogy  on  the  idyllic  life  of  the  Valley 
of  Democracy.  "It  is  in  keeping  with  the  cheery  con- 


The  Gilded  Age  71 

tentment  of  the  West,"  he  said,  "that  it  believes  that 
it  has  'at  home'  or  can  summon  to  its  E.  F.  D.  box 
everything  essential  to  human  happiness."  Why,  he 
added,  the  West  even  has  poets,  admirable  poets,  repre- 
sentative poets ;  and  among  these  poets  he  mentioned  the 
author  of  the  "Spoon  River  Anthology."  There  we 
have  a  belated  but  none  the  less  perfect  illustration  of 
the  romantic  dualism  of  the  Gilded  Age ;  for  in  the  very 
fact  of  becoming  a  cultural  possession  of  the  Middle 
West,  the  "Spoon  River  Anthology"  completely  upsets 
Mr.  Nicholson's  glowing  picture  of  its  life.  Mr.  Nichol- 
son does  not  see  this;  to  him,  as  to  Mr.  Ho  wells,  "the 
more  smiling  aspects  of  life  are  the  more  American," 
but  that  is  because  he  too  has  averted  his  eyes  from  all 
the  other  aspects.  There,  I  say,  in  that  false  syllogism 
of  Mr.  Nicholson's,  we  have  a  perfect  illustration  of  the 
romantic  dualism  of  the  Gilded  Age  and  of  the  part 
literature  was  obliged  to  play  in  it.  Essentially,  Amer- 
ica was  not  happy;  it  was  a  dark  jumble  of  decayed 
faiths,  of  unconfessed  class  distinctions,  of  repressed 
desires,  of  inarticulate  misery — read  "The  Story  of  a 
Country  Town"  and  "A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border" 
and  "Ethan  Frome";  it  was  a  nation  like  other  nations, 
and  one  that  had  no  folk-music,  no  folk-art,  no  folk- 
poetry,  or  next  to  none,  to  express  it,  to  console  it ;  but 
to  have  said  so  would  have  been  to  "hurt  business"! 
It  was  a  horde-life,  a  herd-life,  an  epoch  without  sun  or 
stars,  the  twilight  of  a  human  spirit  that  had  nothing 
upon  which  to  feed  but  the  living  waters  of  Camden 
and  the  dried  manna  of  Concord:  for  the  jolly  family 
party  was  open  to  very  few  and  those,  moreover,  who, 
except  for  their  intense  family  affections  and  a  certain 
hectic  joy  of  action  that  left  them  old  and  worn  at 
fifty-five,  had  forgone  the  best  things  life  has  to  offer. 
But  was  it  not  for  the  welfare  of  all  that  they  so  dili- 
gently promulgated  the  myth  of  America's  "manifest 
destiny"?  Perhaps.  Perhaps,  since  the  prodigious  task 


72       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

of  pioneering  had  to  be  carried  through;  perhaps  also 
because,  after  the  disillusiomnents  of  the  present  epoch, 
that  myth  will  prove  to  have  a  certain  beautiful  resid- 
uum of  truth. 


CHAPTER  IV 

IN  THE  CBUCIBIJD 

"The  American  proposes  to  realize  his  individuality  freely 
and  fully,  but  so  long  as  he  is  master  of  his  person  and  free  to 
choose,  he  considers  himself  satisfied,  willingly  consenting  that 
some  other  person,  better  qualified  or  more  competent,  should 
choose  in  his  place.  From  the  instant  when  he  can  do  what  he 
will,  he  easily  wills  what  he  is  asked  to  will." 

GUSTAVE  RODEIGUES  :  The  People  of  Action. 

T)  ECOLLECT,  now,  the  mood  in  which  Mark  Twain 
IX  went  West  to  the  gold-fields  of  Nevada — the  mood 
of  a  "regular  fellow."  Was  it  not  one  that  exposed 
him,  in  a  peculiar  sense,  to  the  contagion  of  the  Gilded 
Age  ?  For  weeks  after  he  reached  Carson  City  he  played 
about  in  the  woods,  "too  full  of  the  enjoyment  of  camp 
life"  to  build  the  fence  about  a  timber  claim  which  he 
and  a  comrade  had  located.  He  was  out  for  a  good 
time,  oblivious  of  everything  else  and  with  all  the  un- 
consciousness of  a  child.  A  moralist  would  have  said 
that  the  devil  had  already  marked  him  out  for  destruc- 
tion. 

Recollect  how,  on  the  river,  Mark  Twain  had  im- 
pressed his  confreres  of  the  wheel:  "the  pilots  regarded 
him  as  a  great  reader — a  student  of  history,  travels, 
literature  and  the  sciences — a  young  man  whom  it  was 
an  education  as  well  as  an  entertainment  to  know." 
Now,  in  Nevada,  says  Mr.  Paine,  "his  hearers  generally 
regarded  him  as  an  easy-going,  indolent  good  fellow  with 
a  love  of  humor — with  talent,  perhaps — but  as  one  not 
likely  ever  to  set  the  world  afire."  Does  not  that  sug- 
gest a  certain  disintegration  of  the  spirit?  We  infer 
73 


74       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

this,  in  any  case,  from  the  sudden  change  in  his  personal 
appearance,  always  a  sort  of  barometric  symptom  in 
Mark  Twain's  life.  "Lately  a  river  sovereign  and  dandy 
— in  fancy  percales  and  patent  leathers — in  white  duck 
and  striped  shirts — he  had  become  the  roughest  of 
rough-clad  miners,  in  rusty  slouch  hat,  flannel  shirts, 
coarse  trousers,  slopping  half  in  and  half  out  of  the 
heavy  cowskin  boots. ' '  Merely,  you  imagine,  the  natural 
change  in  dress  that  any  gold-seeker  would  have  made? 
No:  "he  went  even  further  than  others  and  became 
a  sort  of  paragon  of  disarray."  An  unmistakable  sur- 
render of  the  pride  and  consciousness  of  his  individu- 
ality !  And  whoever  doubts  the  significance  of  this  may 
well  compare  the  tone  of  his  utterances  as  a  pilot  with 
such  characteristic  notes  of  his  Nevada  life  as  this: 
"If  I  were  not  naturally  a  lazy,  idle,  good-for-nothing 
vagabond  I  could  make  [journalism]  pay  me  $20,000 
a  year.  But  I  don't  suppose  I  shall  ever  be  any  ac- 
count." The  reversion  to  that  earlier  frame  of  mind, 
in  short,  had  not  made  this  man,  who  was  approaching 
thirty,  a  boy  again :  it  made  him  behave  like  a  boy,  it 
made  him,  half  the  time,  feel  like  a  boy,  but  it  revealed 
in  him,  nevertheless,  the  indisputable  signs'  of  a  certain 
dereliction  from  some  path  of  development  his  nature 
had  commanded  him  to  follow.  The  artist  in  him  had 
lost  its  guiding-line;  he  was  "broken  down"  again,  just 
as  he  had  been  after  his  father's  death;  his  spirit  had 
become  plastic  once  more.  He  was  ready,  in  a  word, 
to  take  the  stamp  of  his  new  environment. 

Now,  whatever  was  true  of  America  during  the  Gilded 
Age  was  doubly  true  of  Nevada,  where,  as  Mr.  Paine 
says,  "all  human  beings,  regardless  of  previous  affilia- 
tions and  convictions,  were  flung  into  the  common 
fusing-pot  and  recast  into  the  general  mold  of  pioneer. ' ' 
Life  in  the  gold-fields  was,  in  fact,  an  infinite  intensi- 
fication of  pioneering,  it  was  a  sort  of  furnace  in  which 
all  the  elements  of  human  nature  were  transmuted  into 


In  the  Crucible  75 

a  single  white  flame,  an  incandescence  of  the  passion  of 
avarice.  If  we  are  to  accept  Mark  Twain's  description 
in  "Roughing  It"  of  the  "flush  times"  in  Virginia  City, 
we  can  see  that  the  spirit  of  the  artist  had  about  as 
good  a  chance  of  survival  and  development  there  as  a 
butterfly  in  a  blazing  chimney:  "Virginia  had  grown 
to  be  the  'livest'  town,  for  its  age  and  population,  that 
America  had  ever  produced.  The  side-walks  swarmed 
with  people.  The  streets  themselves  were  just  as 
crowded  with  quartz-wagons,  freight-teams,  and  other 
vehicles.  .  .  .  Joy  sat  on  every  countenance,  and  there 
was  a  glad,  almost  fierce,  intensity  in  every  eye  that  told 
of  the  money-getting  schemes  that  were  seething  in 
every  brain  and  the  high  hope  that  held  sway  in  every 
heart.  Money  was  as  plenty  as  dust.  .  .  .  There  were 
military  companies,  fire  companies,  brass  bands,  banks, 
hotels,  theaters,  'hurdy-gurdy  houses/  wide-open  gam- 
bling palaces,  political  pow-wows,  civic  processions, 
street-fights,  murders,  inquests,  riots,  a  whiskey  mill 
every  fifteen  steps,  a  dozen  breweries,  and  half  a  dozen 
jails  and  station-houses  in  full  operation,  and  some  talk 
of  building  a  church.  The  'flush  times'  were  in  mag- 
nificent flower !  .  .  .  The  great '  Comstock  lode '  stretched 
its  opulent  length  straight  through  the  town  from  North 
to  South,  and  every  mine  on  it  was  in  diligent  process 
of  development." 

This  was  the  spirit  of  Mark  Twain's  new  environment, 
a  spirit  inflexibly  opposed,  as  we  can  see,  to  the  develop- 
ment of  individuality.  Had  Mark  Twain  been  free,  it 
might  have  been  a  matter  of  indifference  to  him;  he 
might  have  gone  his  own  way  and  amused  himself  with 
the  astonishing  spectacle  of  the  gold-fields  and  then 
taken liimself  off  again.  But  Mark  Twain  was  not  free; 
he  was,  on  the  contrary,  bound  in  such  a  way  that,  far 
from  being  able  to  stand  aloof  from  his  environment, 
he  had  to  make  terms  with  it.  For  what  obligations  had 
he  not  incurred !  To  become  such  a  conventional  citizen 


76      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

as  his  father  would  have  approved  of,  to  make  money 
and  restore  the  fallen  fortunes  of  his  family — that  old 
pledge  was  fixed  in  the  back  of  his  mind,  where  it  had 
been  confirmed  by  his  failure  to  discover  and  assert  any 
independent  principle  of  his  own.  Furthermore,  he  now 
had  his  own  financial  record  to  live  up  to.  It  was  the 
lucrativeness  and  prestige  of  the  pilot's  career  that  had 
originally  enabled  him  to  adopt  it,  and  we  know  what 
pride  he  had  had  in  his  "great  triumph,"  in  being  a 
somebody  at  last:  his  brother  Orion  had  considered  it 
a  "disgrace"  to  descend  to  the  trade  of  printing:  they 
were  gentleman's  sons,  these  Clemenses!  He  had  had, 
in  short,  a  chance  to  exercise  and  educate  his  creative 
instinct  while  at  the  same  time  doing  what  was  expected 
of  him.  And  now,  when  he  had  lost  his  guiding-line, 
more  was  expected  of  him  than  ever!  His  salary,  at 
twenty-three,  on  the  river,  had  been  $250  a  month,  a 
vastly  greater  income  certainly  than  his  father  had  ever 
earned:  at  once  and  of  course,  we  are  told,  he  had  be- 
come, owing  to  this  fact,  the  head  of  the  Clemens  family. 
"His  brother  Orion  was  ten  years  older,"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "but  he  had  not  the  gift  of  success.  By  common 
consent,  the  young  brother  assumed  permanently  the 
position  of  family  counselor  and  financier."  These 
circumstances,  I  say,  compelled  Mark  Twain  to  make 
terms  with  public  opinion.  He  could  not  fall  too  far 
behind  the  financial  pace  his  piloting  life  had  set  for 
him.,  he  was  bound  to  recover  the  prestige  that  had  bee  i 
his  and  to  shine  once  more  as  a  conspicuous  and  impor- 
tant personage,  he  had  to  "make  good"  again,  quicklr 
and  spectacularly:  that  was  a  duty  which  had  als . 
become  a  craving.  How  strongly  he  felt  it  we  can  see 
from  one  of  his  Nevada  letters  in  which  he  declares 
earnestly  that  he  will  never  look  upon  his  mother's  face 
again,  or  his  sister's,  or  get  married,  or  revisit  the 
"Banner  State,"  until  he  is  a  rich  man. 
What  chance  was  there  now  for  the  artist  in  Mark 


In  the  Crucible  77 

Twain  to  find  itself?  A  unique  opportunity  had  led  him 
for  four  years  into  the  channel  of  inner  development 
through  a  special  vocation ;  but  it  was  only  the  indis- 
pensability  of  the  pilot  to  the  Mississippi  river  folk  that 
had  obliged  them  to  give  him  such  lordly  freedom.  No 
special  vocation  was  indispensable  in  Nevada;  conse- 
quently, no  special  vocation  was  tolerated.  There,  the 
pioneer  law  of  which  Mr.  Croly  speaks  held  absolute 
sway:  "the  man  who  persisted  in  one  job  interfered 
with  the  rough  good-fellowship  which  naturally  arises 
among  a  group  of  men  who  submit  good-naturedly  and 
uncritically  to  current  standards:  his  higher  standards 
and  peculiar  ways  constituted  an  implied  criticism  upon 
the  easy  methods  of  his  neighbors"  and  he  himself  im- 
paired "the  consistency  of  feeling  upon  which  the  pio- 
neers rightly  placed  such  a  high  value."  Even  if  Mark 
Twain  had  been  fully  aware  of  the  demands  of  his 
creative  instinct,  therefore — and  he  was  anything  but 
fully  aware  of  them — he  could  not  have  fulfilled  them 
now  and  at  the  same  time  fulfilled  his  craving  for  wealth 
and  prestige.  Accordingly,  he  was  obliged  to  acquiesce 
in  the  repression  of  his  individuality.  His  frank  free- 
dom of  sentiment,  his  love  of  reading,  his  constant  desire 
for  privacy — all  those  qualities  that  revealed  his  natural 
creative  instinct — were,  from  the  point  of  view  of  his 
comrades,  just  so  many  "pretensions":  precisely  in  so 
far  as  they  were  "different"  or  "superior,"  they  had 
to  be  taken  down.  The  frequency  and  the  force  of  these 
manifestations,  and  the  tenacity  with  which,  up  to  a 
certain  point,  he  persisted  in  indulging  in  them,  made 
him,  as  we  know,  a  general  butt.  Many  and  "cruel," 
to  use  his  own  word,  were  the  tricks  his  comrades  played 
on  him.  Knowing  his  highly  organized  nervous  system, 
they  devised  the  most  complicated  methods  of  torturing 
him.  There  was  the  incident  of  the  false  Meerschaum 
pipe,  which  cut  him  to  the  quick,  this  man  who  had 
been  betrayed  into  uttering  words  of  heartfelt  grati- 


78       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

tude;  there  were  the  diabolical  monkey-tricks  of  Steve 
Gillis  who,  with  his  "fiendish  tendency  to  mischief," 
was  always  finding  means  to  prevent  him  from  reading ; 
there  was  the  famous  "hold-up  on  the  Divide  on  the  night 
of  his  lecture :  ' '  Mark  didn  't  see  it  our  way, ' '  said  one 
of  the  perpetrators  of  this  last  practical  joke.  "He 
was  mad  clear  through."  In  short,  every  revelation  of 
his  individuality  was  mercilessly  ridiculed,  and  Mark 
Twain  was  reminded  a  dozen  times  a  day  that  his  nat- 
ural instincts  and  desires  and  tendencies  were  incom- 
patible with  pioneer  life  and  fatal  to  the  chances  of  any 
man  who  was  pledged  to  succeed  in  it.  That  is  why, 
though  he  always  retaliated  at  first,  he  always  yielded 
in  the  end. 

Meanwhile,  with  his  creative  instinct  repressed,  his 
acquisitive  instinct,  the  race-instinct  that  rose  as  the 
personal  instinct  fell,  was  stimulated  to  the  highest  de- 
gree. Money  was  so  "easy"  in  Nevada  that  one  could 
hardly  think  of  anything  else.  "I  met  three  friends 
one  afternoon,"  he  says  in  "Roughing  It,"  "who  said 
they  had  been  buying  'Overman'  stock  at  auction  at 
eight  dollars  a  foot.  One  said  if  I  would  come  up  to  his 
office  he  would  give  me  fifteen  feet;  another  said  he 
would  add  fifteen ;  the  third  said  he  would  do  the  same. 
But  I  was  going  after  an  inquest  and  could  not  stop. 
A  few  weeks  afterward  they  sold  all  their  'Overman' 
at  six  hundred  dollars  a  foot  and  generously  came 
around  to  tell  me  about  it — and  also  to  urge  me  to  accept 
of  the  next  forty-five  feet  of  it  that  people  tried  to  force 
on  me.  These  are  actual  facts,  and  I  could  make  the 
list  a  long  one  and  still  confine  myself  strictly  to  the 
truth.  Many  a  time  friends  gave  me  as  much  as  twenty- 
five  feet  of  stock  that  was  selling  at  twenty-five  dollars 
a  foot ;  and  they  thought  no  more  of  it  than  they  would 
of  offering  a  guest  a  cigar.  These  were  'flush  times' 
indeed!"  In  short,  in  order  to  stand  in  with  pioneer 
society,  it  was  not  enough  to  repress  everything  in  you 


In  the  Crucible  79 

that  made  you  "different";  you  had  to  form  extrava- 
gant habits,  you  had  to  treat  money  like  water,  and  you 
had  to  make  it !  Mark  Twain  was  not  merely  obliged 
to  check  his  creative  instinct;  he  was  obliged  to  do  his 
level  best  to  become  a  millionaire. 

It  is  a  significant  fact,  under  these  circumstances,  that 
Mark  Twain  failed  as  a  miner.  He  had  good  luck,  now 
and  then,  enough  to  make  wealth  a  tantalizing  possi- 
bility. He  describes,  though  we  are  told  with  exaggera- 
tion, how  he  was  once  ' '  a  millionaire  for  ten  days. ' '  But 
he  failed  as  a  miner  precisely  because  he  was  unable 
to  bring  to  his  new  work  any  of  those  qualities  that  had 
made  him  so  successful  as  a  pilot.  Concentration,  perse- 
verance, above  all,  judgment — these  were  the  qualities 
that  former  career  had  given  birth  to.  The  craftsman's 
life  had  instantly  matured  him ;  the  life  of  sheer  ex- 
ploitation, in  spite  of  his  sense  of  duty,  in  spite  of  the 
incentives  of  his  environment,  in  spite  of  the  prospects 
of  wealth  and  prestige  it  offered  him,  could  not  fuse  his 
spirit  at  all.  It  only  made  him  frantic  and  lax  by  turns. 
He  went  off  prospecting,  and  with  what  result?  "One 
week  of  this  satisfied  nie, ' '  he  said.  ' '  I  resigned. ' '  Then 
he  flung  himself  into  quartz-mining.  ' '  The  letters  which 
went  from  the  Aurora  miner  to  Orion,"  we  are  told, 
"are  humanly  documentary.  They  are  likely  to  be 
staccato  in  their  movement;  they  show  nervous  haste 
in  their  composition,  eagerness,  and  suppressed  excite- 
ment; they  are  not  always  coherent;  they  are  seldom 
humorous,  except  in  a  savage  way;  they  are  often  pro- 
fane ;  they  are  likely  to  be  violent.  Even  the  handwrit- 
ing has  a  terse  look ;  the  nourish  of  youth  has  gone  out 
of  it.  Altogether  they  reveal  the  tens6  anxiety  of  the 
gambling  mania."  Then  the  pendulum  swings  to  the 
other  extreme:  he  is  utterly  disgusted  and  has  but  or" 
wish,  to  give  up  everything  and  go  away.  "If  Sam  had 
got  that  pocket,"  said  one  of  his  comrades,  of  his  last 
exploit,  ' '  he  would  have  remained  a  pocket-miner  to  the 


80      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

end  of  his  days";  but  he  would  have  got  it  if  he  had 
been  able  to  bring  to  the  situation  any  of  the  qualities 
he  would  have  brought  to  a  critical  situation  on  the 
lyiississippi.  It  is  quite  plain  that  he  failed  simply  be- 

jcause  he  did  not  care  enough  about  money,  merely  as 

money,  to  succeed.     His  real  self,  the  artist,  in  short, 

NJ    [  could  not  develop,  and  yet,  repressed  as  it  was,  it  pre- 

!  vented  him  from  becoming  whole-heartedly   anything 
else.    We  shall  see  this  exhibited  throughout  the  whole 

,  of  Mark  Twain's  business  life. 

So  here  was  Mark  Twain  face  to  face  with  a  dilemma. 
His  unconscious  desire  was  to  be  an  artist,  but  this 
implied  an  assertion  of  individuality  that  was  a  sin  in 
the  eyes  of  his  mother  and  a  shame  in  the  eyes  of  society. 
On  the  other  hand,  society  and  his  mother  wanted  him 
to  be  a  business  man,  and  for  this  he  could  not  summon 
up  the  necessary  powers  in  himself.  The  eternal 
dilemma  of  every  American  writer !  It  was  the  dilemma 
which,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  end,  Mark  Twain  solved 
by  becoming  a  humorist. 

Only  a  few  hints  of  the  dumb  conflict  that  was  passing 
in  Mark  Twain's  soul  rise  to  the  surface  of  Mr.  Paine 's 
pages.  We  are  told  scarcely  more  than  that  he  was 
extremely  moody.  "He  was  the  life  of  the  camp,"  one 
of  his  comrades  recalled,  "but  sometimes  there  would 
come  a  reaction  and  he  would  hardly  speak  for  a  day 
or  two."  Constantly  we  find  him  going  off  "alone 
into  the  wilderness  to  find  his  balance  and  to  get  away 
entirely  from  humankind."  There  were  other  times 
when  he  "talked  little  or  not  at  all,  but  sat  in  one  corner 
and  wrote,  wholly  oblivious  of  his  surroundings" — 
wrote  letters,  his  companions  thought,  for  they  would 
hardly  have  left  him  in  peace  had  they  imagined  he  was 
writing  anything  else.  All  this  time,  plainly,  his  crea- 
tive instinct  was  endeavoring  to  establish  itself,  with 
what  mixed  motives,  however,  we  can  see  from  the  fact 
that  he  signed  his  first  printed  pieces  with  the  pen-name 


In  the  Crucible  81 

"Josh."  "He  did  not  care  to  sign  his  own  name," 
says  Mr.  Paine.  "He  was  a  miner  who  was  soon  to  be 
a  magnate;  he  had  no  desire  to  be  known  as  a  camp- 
scribbler."  How  much  meaning  there  is  in  that  sen- 
tence ! — all  the  contempt  and  hostility  of  the  pioneers 
for  literature,  all  Mark  Twain's  fear  of  public  opinion, 
all  the  force  of  his  own  counter-impulse  to  succeed  on 
pioneer  terms,  to  stand  in  with  society,  to  suppress  in 
rhimself  a  desire  that  was  so  unpopular.  We  can  see 
these  mixed  motives  in  the  strange,  realistic  bravado  with 
which  he  said  to  a  man  who  wanted  to  start  a  literary 
magazine  in  Virginia  City:  "You  would  succeed  if  any 
one  could,  but  start  a  flower-garden  on  the  desert  of 
Sahara,  set  up  hoisting-works  on  Mount  Vesuvius  for 
mining  sulphur,  start  a  literary  paper  in  Virginia  City ; 
hell!" 

Nevertheless,  there  was  in  Virginia  City  a  paper  with 
some  literary  pretensions  called  the  Enterprise,  which 
was  edited  and  written  by  a  group  of  men  famous  all 
over  the  "West  for  their  wit  and  talent.  It  was  to  the 
Enterprise  that  Mark  Twain  had  been  sending  his  writ- 
ings, and  at  last  he  was  offered  a  position  on  the  staff. 
This  position  he  presently  accepted.  It  is  significant, 
however,  that  he  did  so  with  profound  reluctance. 

Assuming,  as  we  are  obliged  to  assume,  that  Mark 
Twain  was  a  born  writer,  it  is  natural  to  suppose  that  he 
would  have  welcomed  any  opportunity  to  exchange  his 
uncongenial  and  futile  life  as  a  miner  for  a  life  of  lit- 
erary activities  and  associations.  He  would  naturally 
have  gravitated  toward  such  people  as  the  Enterprise 
group :  that  he  did  so  is  proved  by  his  constantly  court- 
ing them  as  a  contributor.  But  committing  himself  by 
accepting  their  offer  of  a  position  was  quite  a  different 
matter,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  they,  as  happy-go-lucky 
journalists,  were  in  perfectly  good  standing  with  the 
rest  of  the  pioneers.  ' '  Everybody  had  money ;  everybody 
wanted  to  laugh  and  have  a  good  time,"  says  Mr.  Paine. 


82      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

"The  Enterprise,  'Comstock  to  the  backbone,'  did  what 
it  could  to  help  things  along."  Certainly  Mark  Twain 
could  not  have  thought  he  would  be  losing  caste  by  con- 
necting himself  with  an  institution  like  that!  There, 
in  short,  was  his  chance  at  last,  as  one  might  suppose ; 
and  how  did  he  receive  it?  "In  'Roughing  It,'  "  says 
Mr.  Paine,  "we  are  led  to  believe  that  the  author  re- 
garded this  as  a  gift  from  heaven  and  accepted  it 
straightway.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  fasted  and  prayed 
a  good  while  over  the  '  call, '  ' '  and  it  was  only  when  ' '  the 
money  situation"  had  become  truly  "desperate"  and  he 
had  lost  all  hope  of  making  his  way  as  a  miner  that  he 
accepted  it.  Before  binding  himself  he  set  off  at  mid- 
night, alone  and  on  foot,  for  a  seventy-mile  walk  through 
uninhabited  country:  "He  had  gone  into  the  wilder- 
ness," says  Mr.  Paine,  "to  fight  his  battle  alone";  and 
we  are  told  that  he  came  out  again  eight  days  later  with 
his  mind  still  undecided.  How  different  that  all  is  from 
the  mood  in  which  he  had  entered  upon  his  piloting 
career!  There  had  been  no  hesitation  then!  He  had 
walked  forward  with  clear  eye  and  sure  foot  like  a 
man  registering  an  inevitable  choice  of  his  whole  soul. 
Now  he  has  to  battle  with  himself  and  the  step  he  finally 
takes  has,  to  my  sense,  the  strangest  air  of  a  capitulation. 
He  walked  all  the  way  from  Aurora  to  Virginia  City, 
a  hundred  and  thirty  miles,  drifting  into  the  Enterprise 
office  worn  and  travel-stained,  we  are  told,  on  a  hot, 
dusty  August  day.  "My  starboard  leg  seems  to  be 
unshipped, ' '  he  announced  at  the  door.  "  I  'd  like  about 
one  hundred  yards  of  line;  I  think  I  am  falling  to 
pieces."  Then  he  added:  "My  name  is  Clemens,  and 
I've  come  to  write  for  the  paper."  It  was  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "the  master  of  the  world's  widest  estate  come  to 
claim  his  kingdom."  Am  I  mistaken,  however,  in  feel- 
ing that  there  is  something  painful  in  that  scene,  some- 
thing shamefaced,  something  that  suggests  not  an 
acclamation  but  a  surrender?  *u*±.  .  Uo 


In  the  Crucible  83 

Mr.  Paine,  indeed,  perceives  that  in  joining  the  staff 
of  the  Enterprise  Mark  Twain  was  in  some  way  trans- 
gressing his  own  desire.  He  attributes  this,  however,  to 
another  motive  than  the  one  that  seems  to  me  dominant. 
Clemens,  he  says,  displayed  "no  desperate  eagerness  to 
break  into  literature,  even  under  those  urgent  condi- 
tions. It  meant  the  surrender  of  all  hope  in  the  mines, 
the  confession  of  another  failure."  No  doubt  Mark 
Twain's  masculine  pride  revolted  against  that;  he  had 
more  or  less  committed  himself  to  mining,  he  was  turn- 
ing his  back  besides  on  the  line  of  activity  his  mother 
and  his  companions  approved  of;  he  was  relinquishing 
the  possibility  of  some  sudden,  dazzling  stroke  of  for- 
tune that  might  have  bought  his  freedom  once  for  all. 
In  short,  there  were  plenty  of  reasons  dictated  by  his 
acquisitive  instinct  for  making  him  reluctant  to  sur- 
render the  mining  career  in  which  he  had  proved  himself 
so  inept.  But  although  his  acquisitive  instinct  had  been 
stimulated  to  excess,  in  his  heart  of  hearts  he  was  not 
a  money-maker  but  an  artist,  and  the  artist  in  him  would 
naturally,  as  I  say,  have  acclaimed  this  opportunity. 
In  order  to  understand  his-  reluctance,  therefore,  we 
must  consider  not  only  the  hopes  he  was  giving  up  with 
his  mining  career  but  the  character  of  that  opportunity 
also.  Somehow,  in  this  new  call,  the  creative  instinct 
in  Mark  Twain  not  only  failed  to  recognize  its  own  but 
actually  foresaw  some  element  of  danger.  What,  briefly, 
did  the  Enterprise  mean  for  him  ?  He  had  been  sending 
in  his  compositions;  he  had  been  trying  his  hand,  ex- 
perimenting, we  know,  in  different  styles,  and  only  his 
humor  "took."  He  had  written  at  last  a  burlesque 
report  of  a  Fourth  of  July  oration  which  opened  with 
the  words,  "I  was  sired  by  the  Great  American  Eagle 
and  foaled  by  a  continental  dam, ' '  and  it  was  this  that 
had  won  the  editor's  heart  and  prompted  him  to  offer 
Clemens  the  position.  "That,"  said  he,  "is  the  sort  of 
thing  we  want,"  Mark  Twain  knew  this;  he  knew  that, 


84       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

although  the  policy  of  the  Enterprise  was  one  of  "abso- 
lutely free  speech,"  he  would  be  expected  to  cultivate 
that  one  vein  alone  and  that  his  own  craving  for  wealth 
and  prestige,  the  obligation  to  make  money  which  would 
become  all  the  more  pressing  if  he  relinquished  the 
direct  acquisitive  path  of  the  mining  life,  would  prevent 
him  from  crossing  the  editor's  will  or  from  cultivating 
any  other  vein  than  that  which  promised  him  the  great- 
est popularity.  For  him,  therefore,  the  opportunity  of 
the  Enterprise  meant  an  obligation  to  become  virtually 
a  professional  humorist,  and  this  alone.  Had  he  wished 
f  td'  become  a  humorist,  we  are  now  in  a  position  to  see, 
I  lie  would  not  have  displayed  such  reluctance  in  joining 
*  the  Enterprise,  and  the  fact  that  he  displayed  this 
reluctance  shows  us  that  in  becoming  a  humorist  he  felt 
that  in  some  way  he  was  selling  rather  than  fulfilling 
his  own  soul. 

Why  this  was  so  we  cannot  consider  at  present:  the 
time  has  not  yet  come  to  discuss  the  psychogenesis  and 
the  significance  of  Mark  Twain's  humor.  But  that  it 
was  so  we  have  ample  evidence.  Mr.  Cable  tells  how, 
to  his  amazement,  once,  when  he  and  Clemens  were  giv- 
ing a  public  reading  together,  the  latter,  whom  he  had 
supposed  happy  and  satisfied  with  his  triumphant  suc- 
cess, turned  to  him  on  their  way  back  to  the  hotel  and 
said  with  a  groan,  ' '  Oh,  Cable,  I  am  demeaning  myself — 
I  am  allowing  myself  to  be  a  mere  buffoon.  It's  ghastly. 
I  can't  endure  it  any  longer."  And  all  the  next  day, 
Mr.  Cable  says,  he  sedulously  applied  himself,  in  spite 
of  the  immense  applause  that  had  greeted  him,  to  choos- 
ing selections  for  his  next  reading  which  would  be 
justified  not  only  as  humor  but  as  literature  and  art. 
This  is  only  one  of  many  instances  of  Mark  Twain's 
lifelong  revolt  against  a  role  which  he  apparently  felt 
had  been  thrust  upon  him.  It  is  enough  to  corroborate 
all  our  intuitions  regarding  the  reluctance  with  which 
he  accepted  it. 


Ill  the  Crucible  85 

But  there  is  plenty  of  other  evidence  to  corroborate 
these  intuitions.  Mr.  Paine  tells  us  that  henceforth,  in 
his  letters  home,  "the  writer  rarely  speaks  of  his  work 
at  all,  and  is  more  inclined  to  tell  of  the  mining  shares 
he  has  accumulated,"  that  there  is  "no  mention  of  his 
new  title" — the  pen-name  he  had  adopted — "and  its 
success."  He  knew  that  his  severe  Calvinistic  mother 
could  hardly  sympathize  with  his  scribblings,  worthy  or 
unworthy,  that  she  was  much  more  concerned  about  the 
money  he  was  making ;  he  who  had  sworn  never  to  come 
home  again  until  he  was  a  rich  man  was  ashamed  in  his 
mother's  eyes  to  have  adopted  a  career  that  promised 
him  success  indeed,  but  a  success  incomparable  with  that 
of  the  mining  magnate  he  had  set  out  to  be.  Still,  that 
success  immediately  proved  to  be  considerable,  and  if 
he  had  felt  any  essential  pride  in  his  new  work  he 
would  certainly  have  said  something  about  it.  What  we 
actually  find  him  writing  is  this:  "I  cannot  overcome 
my  repugnance  to  telling  what  I  am  doing  or  what  I 
expect  to  do  or  propose  to  do. ' '  That  he  had  no  essential 
pride  in  this  work,  that  it  was  not  personal,  that  he  did 
not  think  of  it  as  a  true  expression  of  himself  but  rather 
as  a  commodity  we  can  see  from  the  motives  with  which 
he  chose  his  pen-name :  ' '  His  letters,  copied  and  quoted 
all  along  the  Coast,  were  unsigned,"  says  Mr.  Paine. 
"They  were  easily  identified  with  one  another,  but  not 
with  a  personality.  He  realized  that  to  build  a  reputa- 
tion it  was  necessary  to  fasten  it  to  an  individuality,  a 
name.  He  gave  the  matter  a  good  deal  of  thought. 
He  did  not  consider  the  use  of  his  own  name;  the 
nom  de  plume  was  the  fashion  of  the  time.  He 
wanted  something  brief,  crisp,  definite,  unforget- 
table. He  tried  over  a  good  many  combinations  in 
his  mind,  but  none  seemed  convincing,"  etc.,  etc.  In 
short,  he  wanted  a  trade  mark  in  order  to  sell  what  he 
instinctively  regarded  as  his  merchandise ;  and  the  fact 
that  the  pen-name  was  the  fashion  of  the  time — in 


86      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

pioneer  circles,  especially,  observe — simply  argues  that 
all  the  other  writers  in  the  West  were  in  a  similar  case. 
The  pen-name  was  a  form  of  "protective  coloration"  for 
men  who  could  not  risk,  in  their  town  persons,  the  odium 
of  the  literary  life,  and  it  is  an  interesting  coincidence 
that  "Mark  Twain,"  in  the  pilot's  vocabulary,  implied 
"safe  water."  We  shall  see  later  how  very  significant 
this  coincidence  was  in  Mark  Twain's  life:  what  we 
observe  now  is  that  he  instinctively  thought  of  his 
writing  as  something  external  to  himself,  as  something 
of  which  he  was  proud  only  because  it  paid. 

It  is  quite  plain,  then,  that  far  from  having  found 
himself  again,  as  he  had  once  found  himself  on  the 
Mississippi,  Mark  Twain  had  now  gone  astray.  He  had 
his  ups  and  downs,  his  success,  however  prodigious,  was 
intermittent ;  but  whether  he  was  up  or  whether  he  was 
down  he  was  desperately  ill-at-ease  within:  his  letters 
and  memoranda  show  all  the  evidence  of  a  "bad  con- 
science."  Hear  him  in  San  Francisco:  "We  have  been 
here  only  four  months,  yet  we  have  changed  our  lodgings 
five  times.  We  are  very  comfortably  fixed  where  we  are 
now  and  have  no  fault  to  find  with  the  rooms  or  the 
people.  .  .  .  But  I  need  change  and  must  move  again." 
Whatever  else  that  incessant,  senseless  movement  may 
mean,  it  is  certainly  not  the  sign  of  a  man  whose  work 
absorbs  him,  whose  nature  is  crystallizing  along  its 
proper  lines.  "Home  again,"  he  notes  in  his  journal, 
after  those  weeks  of  respite  in  the  Sandwich  Islands. 
"No — not  home  again — in  prison  again,  and  all  the  wild 
sense  of  freedom  gone.  The  city  seems  so  cramped  and 
so  dreary  with  toil  and  care  and  business  anxiety.  God 
help  me,  I  wish  I  were  at  sea  again!"  Work,  writing, 
had  become  in  his  eyes  identical  with  toil:  "Clemens 
once  declared  he  had  been  so  blue  at  this  period, ' '  says 
Mr.  Paine,  "that  one  morning  he  put  a  loaded  pistol  to 
his  head,  but  found  he  lacked  courage  to  pull  the  trig- 
ger." And  observe,  finally,  what  he  writes  to  his  mother 


In  the  Crucible  87 

from  New  York  as  he  is  about  to  start  on  the  Quaker 
City  excursion  which  is  to  result  in  "The  Innocents 
Abroad"  and  his  great  fame.  There  are  two  letters, 
written  within  the  same  week  of  June,  1867 ;  the  eager- 
ness of  his  youth  does  not  suffice  to  explain  their  agita- 
tion. In  the  first  he  says:  "I  am  wild  with  impatience 
to  move — move — move!  .  .  .  Curse  the  endless  delays! 
They  always  kill  me — they  make  me  neglect  every  duty 
and  then  I  have  a  conscience  that  tears  me  like  a  wild 
beast.  I  wish  I  never  had  to  stop  anywhere  a  month." 
The  second  is  even  more  specific:  "I  am  so  worthless 
that  it  seems  to  me  I  never  do  anything  or  accomplish 
anything  that  lingers  in  my  mind  as  a  pleasant  memory. 
My  mind  is  stored  full  of  unworthy  conduct  toward 
Orion  and  toward  you  all,  and  an  accusing  conscience 
gives  me  peace  only  in  excitement  and  restless  moving 
from  place  to  place.  .  .  .  You  observe  that  under  a 
cheerful  exterior  I  have  got  a  spirit  that  is  angry  with 
me  and  gives  me  freely  its  contempt."  The  reason  he 
assigns  for  this  frame  of  mind  is  wholly  unacceptable: 
far  from  being  guilty  of  "unworthy  conduct"  toward 
his  family,  there  is  every  evidence  that  he  had  been,  as 
he  remained,  the  most  loyal  and  bountiful  of  sons  and 
guardians.  "Under  a  cheerful  exterior  I  have  got  a 
spirit  that  is  angry  with  me  and  gives  me  freely  its 
contempt. ' '  Could  he  say  more  plainly  that  he  has  com- 
mitted himself  to  a  course  of  action  which  has,  in  some 
quite  definite  way,  transgressed  his  principle  of  growth? 
One  further,  final  proof.  In  1865  "The  Jumping 
Frog"  was  published  in  New  York,  where,  according  to 
one  of  the  California  correspondents,  it  was  "voted  the 
best  thing  of  the  day. ' '  How  did  Clemens,  who  was  still 
in  the  West,  receive  the  news  of  his  success  ?  ' '  The  tele- 
graph," gays  Mr.  Paine,  "did  not  carry  such  news  in 
those  days,  and  it  took  a  good  while  for  the  echo  of  his 
victory  to  travel  to  the  Coast.  When  at  last  a  lagging 
word  of  it  did  arrive,  it  would  seem  to  have  brought 


88       The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

disappointment,  rather  than  exaltation,  to  the  author. 
Even  Art  emus  Ward's  opinion  of  the  story  had  not 
increased  Mark  Twain's  regard  for  it  as  literature.  That 
it  had  struck  the  popular  note  meant,  as  he  believed, 
failure  for  his  more  highly  regarded  work.  In  a  letter 
written  January  20,  1866,  he  says  these  things  for  him- 
self: 'I  do  not  know  what  to  write;  my  life  is  so 
uneventful.  I  wish  I  was  back  there  piloting  up  and 
down  the  river  again.  Verily,  all  is  vanity  and  little 
worth — save  piloting.  To  think  that,  after  writing  many 
an  article  a  man  might  be  excused  for  thinking  tolerably 
good,  those  New  York  people  should  single  out  a  villain 
ous  backwoods  sketch  to  compliment  me  on! — "Jim 
Smiley  and  His  Jumping  Frog" — a  squib  which  would 
never  have  been  written  but  to  please  Artemus  Ward. '  ' 
He  had  thought  so  little  of  that  story  indeed  that  he  had 
not  even  offered  it  to  The  Calif ornian,  the  magazine  to 
which  he  was  a  staff  contributor :  "he  did  not,"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  ' '  regard  it  highly  as  literary  material. ' '  We  can 
see  in  that  letter  the  bitter  prompting  of  his  creative 
instinct,  in  rebellion  against  the  course  he  has  drifted 
into;  we  can  see  how  his  acquisitive  instinct,  on  the 
other  hand,  forbids  him  to  gainsay  the  success  he  has 
achieved.  "I  am  in  for  it,"  he  writes  to  his  brother. 
"I  must  go  on  chasing  [phantoms]  until  I  marry,  then 
I  am  done  with  literature  and  all  other  bosh — that  is, 
literature  wherewith  to  please  the  general  public.  I 
shall  write  to  please  myself  then."  Marriage,  he  says 
to  himself,  is  going  to  liberate  him,  this  poor,  ingenuous 
being! — this  divided  soul  who  has  never  been  able  to 
find  any  other  criterion  than  that  ,of  an  environment 
which  knows  no  criterion  but  success.  His  destiny,  mean- 
while, has  passed  out  of  his  own  hands:  that  is  the 
significance  of  the  "victory"  of  "The  Jumping  Frog." 
As  Mr.  Paine  says,  with  terrible,  unconscious  irony: 
"The  stone  rejected  by  the  builder  was  made  the  corner- 
stone of  his  literary  edifice." 


In  the  Crucible  89 

So  much  for  Mark  Twain's  motives  in  becoming  a 
humorist.  He  had  adopted  this  role  unwillingly,  as  a 
compromise,  at  the  expense  of  his  artistic  self-respect,  ; 
because  it  afforded  the  only  available  means  of  satisfying  •' 
that  other  instinct  which,  in  the  unconsciousness  of  his  j 
creative  instinct,  had  become  dominant  in  him,  the  / 
gregarious,  acquisitive  instinct  of  the  success-loving 
pioneer.  And  what  a  corroboration  that  instinct  now-" 
received!  Was  ever  a  choice  more  thrillingly  ratified 
by  public  opinion!  "Limelight  and  the  center  of  the 
stage, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine, ' '  was  a  passion  of  Sam  Clemens  'a 
boyhood,  a  love  of  the  spectacular  that  never  wholly 
died.  .  .  .  Like  Tom  Sawyer,  he  loved  the  glare  and 
trappings  of  leadership."  The  permanent  dream  of  his 
childhood,  indeed,  had  been  to  become  "  something  gor- 
geous and  active,  where  his  word — his  nod,  even,  consti- 
tuted sufficient  law."  Here  we  see  exhibited  what  Alfred 
Adler  calls  the  "masculine  protest,"  the  desire  to  be 
more  than  manly  in  order  to  escape  the  feeling  of  in- 
security, for  Mark  Twain,  who  was  a  weak  child,  could 
never  have  survived  in  the  rough-and-tumble  of  Hanni- 
bal life  if  he  had  not  exerted  his  imagination  and 
prevailed  over  his  companions  by  means  other  than 
physical.  This  dream  had  been  fulfilled  in  his  piloting 
career,  which  was  at  once  autocratic  and  spectacular. 
United  now,  a  deep  craving  to  shine,  with  his  other 
desire  to  make  money,  to  please  his  family,  to  "make 
good"  in  pioneer  terms,  it  received  a  confirmation  so 
prodigious  that  the  despised,  rejected,  repressed,  in- 
articulate poet  in  Mark  Twain  was  immediately  struck 
dumb  and  his  doubts  and  chagrins  and  disappointments 
were  lulled  to  rest. 

Already,  in  Nevada,  Mark  Twain  had  been  pointed 
out  as  one  of  the  sights  of  the  territory ;  his  sayings  were 
everywhere  repeated  on  the  streets.  Tom  Sawyer  was 
walking  the  stage  and  ' '  revelling  in  his  power. ' '  Crashes 
of  applause  greeted  his  platform  sallies;  "the  Comstock, 


90      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ready  to  laugh,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "found  delight  in  his 
expression  and  discovered  a  vast  humor  in  his  most 
earnest  statements";  the  opera-houses  of  the  mining- 
towns  wherever  he  went  were  packed  at  two  dollars  a 
seat;  "his  improved  dress  and  increased  prosperity 
commanded  additional  respect."  He  had  "acquired," 
in  short,  "a  new  and  lucrative  profession  at  a  bound"; 
and  before  he  went  East,  and  owing  to  the  success  of 
"The  Jumping  Frog,"  "those  about  him  were  inclined 
to  regard  him,  in  some  degree  at  least,  as  a  national 
literary  figure,  and  to  pay  tribute  accordingly."  When 
he  set  out  on  the  voyage  of  the  Quaker  City  he  found 
himself  "billed  as  an  attraction"  with  General  Sher- 
man and  Henry  Ward  Beecher.  But  this  was  only  a 
faint  promise  of  the  glory  that  was  to  follow  the  pub- 
lication of  ' '  The  Innocents  Abroad. ' '  It  was  his  second 
book :  his  profits  were  $300,000,  and  it  brought  him  into 
instant  and  intimate  contact  with  the  most  distinguished 
people  in  America.  Besides  this,  it  brought  him  the 
recognition  of  The  Atlantic  Monthly.  It  brought  him 
offers  of  political  preferment :  a  diplomatic  position,  the 
postmastership  of  San  Francisco,  with  a  salany  of 
$10,000  a  year,  a  choice  of  five  influential  offices  in 
California,  anything  he  might  be  disposed  to  accept — 
"they  want  to  send  me  abroad,  as  a  Consul  or  a  Min- 
ister," he  writes  from  Washington:  judges  pledge  the 
President's  appointment,  senators  guarantee  the  con- 
firmation of  the  Senate.  It  brought  him  presently  a 
tremendous  reception  from  "the  brains  of  London, 
assembled  at  the  annual  dinner  of  the  sheriffs  of  London 
— mine  being  (between  you  and  me),"  he  writes  to  his 
publisher,  "a  name  which  was  received  with  a  flattering 
outburst  of  spontaneous  applause  when  the  long  list  of 
guests  was  called."  It  brought  him  an  offer  from  at 
least  one  magazine  of  "$6,000  cash  for  twelve  articles,  of 
any  length  and  on  any  subject."  It  brought  him  lecture 
-^gagements  that  paid  him  $1,600  in  gold  for  a  single 


In  the  Crucible  91 

evening;  and  so  popular  were  these  lectures  that  when 
one  night  in  Pittsburgh  he  "played"  against  Fanny 
Kemble,  the  favorite  actress  of  the  period, ' '  Miss  Kemble 
had  an  audience  of  two  hundred  against  nearly  ten  times 
the  number  who  gathered  to  hear  Mark  Twain."  Could 
this  divided  soul,  who  had  rebelled  against  the  career 
into  which  he  was  drifting,  question  a  verdict  like  that? 
Almost  from  the  outset  his  filial  conscience  had  been 
appeased :  of  his  first  lecture  tour  in  Nevada  and  Cali- 
fornia we  are  told  that  "it  paid  him  well;  he  could  go 
home  now,  without  shame."  But  even  the  promptings 
of  his  artistic  conscience  were  now  parried  and  laid  at 
rest:  "he  had  grown  more  lenient  in  his  opinion  of  the 
merits  of  the  'Frog'  story  itself  since  it  had  made 
friends  in  high  places,  especially  since  James  Russell 
Lowell  had  pronounced  it  'the  finest  piece  of  humorous 
writing  yet  produced  in  America.'  '  Thus  whatever 
doubts  Mark  Twain  might  still  have  harbored  regarding 
the  vital  propriety  of  his  new  career  were  opportunely 
overlaid  by  the  very  persons  he  could  not  fail  to  respect 
the  most. 

It  was  this  last  fact,  without  doubt,  that  sealed  his 
destiny.    James  Eussell  Lowell  and  ' '  the  brains  of  Lon- 
don"!   There  was  little  criticism  in  their  careless  judg-  I 
ments,  but  how  was  Mark  Twain  to  know  that  ?    He  was  | 
a  humorist,  they  accepted  him  as  a  humorist ;  they  had  j 
no  means  of  knowing  that  he  was  intended  to  be  some-  \ 
thing  else,  that  he  really  wished  to  be  something  else. 
They  found  him  funny,  and  he  was  just  as  funny  as 
they  found  him;  but  to  Mark  Twain  their  praise  meant 
more  than  that;  it  meant  something  like  a  solemn  sanc- 
tion of  his  career  from  the  world  of  culture.     "Cer- 
tainly," says  Mr.  Paine,  of  one  of  his  first  triumphal 
visits  to  London,  "certainly  he  was  never  one  to  give 
himself  airs;  but  to  have   the  world's  great  literary 
center  paying  court  to  him,  who  only  ten  years  before 
had  been  penniless  and1  unknown,  and  who  once  had 


92      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

been  a  barefoot  Tom  Sawyer  in  Hannibal,  was  quite 
startling."  Innocent  barefoot  boy!  As  if  the  true 
forces  of  criticism  ever  operated  in  the  presence  of 
a  visiting  foreigner !  Mark  Twain  had  not  seen  English- 
men applaud  when  Joaquin  Miller,  at  a  London  dinner- 
table,  thrust  half  a  dozen  cigars  into  his  mouth  at  once 
and  exclaimed:  "That's  the  way  we  do  it  in  the  States!" 
He  didn't  know  how  much  the  tribute  was  a  tribute  to 
his-  oddity,  his  mere  picturesqueness ;  he  didn't  know 
that  he  was  being  gulled,  and  partly  because  he  wasn't 
— because  the  beautiful  force  of  his  natural  personality 
would  have  commanded  attention  anywhere,  because, 
also,  "the  brains  of  London,"  the  brains  of  Guildhall 
banquets,  are  not  too  discriminating  when  it  comes  to 
"laughter  and  tears"  with  slow  music,  or  books  like 
"The  Innocents  Abroad."  But  Mark  Twain's  was  not 
the  mind  to  note  these  subtle  shades.  What  he  saw  was 
that  he  was  being  heartily  slapped  on  the  back,  in  no 
too  obviously  patronizing  way,  by  the  people  who  really 
knew,  whose  judgment  could  really  be  trusted.  Yet 
England,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  so  far  as  he  was  concerned, 
was  simply  countersigning  the  verdict  of  America. 

For  if,  observe,  Mark  Twain's  first  counselors  at 
home  had  been  plain  men  of  business,  with  an  eye  single 
to  returns  in  cash,  he  might  have  seen  a  light  and  made 
a  stand  against  the  career  of  self-exploitation  into  which 
he  was  drifting.  It  would  not  have  been  easy :  from  the 
moment  when  "The  Jumping  Frog"  had  "set  all  New 
York  in  a  roar,"  business  agents  and  other  brokers  in 
fame  and  bullion  had  begun  to  swarm  about  .this  popular 
young  man  like  ravenous  gulls  in  the  wake  of  a  ship. 
But  the  counsels  of  some  of  the  most  famous  and  revered 
men  in  America  played  into  the  hands  of  these  agents, 
and  surrendered  Mark  Twain  over  to  them.  Anson 
Burlingame,  Henry  Ward  Beecher,  even  Artemus  Ward 
— these  must  have  been  great  names  to  the  Nevada 
miner  of  the  sixties.  One  was  a  diplomat,  one  a  clergy- 


In  the  Crucible  93 

man,  one  a  writer ;  their  national  prestige  was  not  based 
upon  money ;  to  Mark  Twain  they  could  not  have  seemed 
anything  less  than  masters,  in  some  degree,  of  the  life 
of  the  spirit.  And  all  their  influence  corroborated  the 
choice  Mark  Twain  had  already  made. 

It  was  during  the  "flush  times"  in  Virginia  City  that 
he  had  met  Artemus  Ward  who,  on  the  pinnacle  of  his 
career,  was,  for  all  that  little  Nevada  world,  the  very 
symbol  of  the  literary  life  itself.  "Clemens,"  we  are 
told,  "measured  himself  by  this  man  who  had  achieved 
fame,  and  perhaps  with  good  reason  concluded  that 
Ward's  estimate  was  correct,  that  he  too  could  win  fame 
and  honor,  once  he  got  a  start."  We  can  see  what 
Ward's  counsel  had  been:  he  had  accepted  Mark  Twain, 
not  as  a  creative  spirit  with  possibilities  of  inner  growth 
before  him — what  could  Artemus  Ward  have  known 
about  such  things  ? — but  as  an  embryonic  institution,  so 
to  speak,  as  a  "going  concern,"  a  man  who  had  already 
capitalized  himself  and  wanted  only  a  few  practical 
hints.  Concretely  he  told  him  that  he  ought  to  "extend 
his  audience  eastward."  Burlingame's  advice  was  sub- 
tler, but  it  came  to  mucK  the  same  thing.  "You  have 
great  ability, ' '  said  he ;  "I  believe  you  have  genius. 
What  you  need  now  is  the  refinement  of  association. 
Seek  companionship  among  men  of  superior  intellect 
and  character.  Refine  yourself  and  your  work.  Never 
affiliate  with  inferiors;  always  climb."  If  Dostoievsky 
and  Dickens  and  Victor  Hugo  had  been  constrained  to 
accept  such  advice  in  their  youth,  where  should  we  look 
now  for  "Crime  and  Punishment"  and  "Bleak  House" 
and  "Les  Miserables"?  We  cannot  blame  Artemus  Ward 
"and  Anson  Burlingame  for  knowing  nothing  about  the 
creative  life  and  its  processes;  and  how  can  we  blame 
the  poor,  ignorant,  unawakened  poet  in  Mark  Twain  for 
not  withstanding  the  prestige  of  men  who,  more  than 
any  others  he  had  known,  had  won  their  spurs  in  the 
field  of  the  spirit?  Even  if  it  had  not  already  beea  too 


1 


94      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

late,  there  were  probably  not  ten  souls  in  all  America 
capable  of  so  divining  the  spirit  of  this  lovable  child 
as  to  have  said  to  him:  "You  were  right  in  wishing  to 
repudiate  that  line  of  least  resistance.  Put  money  and 
fame,  superiors  and  inferiors,  out  of  your  mind.  Break 
your  ties  now  and,  instead  of  climbing,  descend — into 
life  and  into  yourself."  Mark  Twain  had  followed 
Ward's  injunction  and  "extended  his  audience  east- 
ward" by  going  East  himself.  He  "never  forgot,"  we 
are  told,  "that  advice"  of  Anson  Burlingame:  indeed, 
he  acted  upon  it  immediately  by  associating  himself  with 
the  "choice  and  refined  party"  of  the  Quaker  City 
excursion  which  led  him  to  the  feet  of  his  future  wife. 
But  it  led  him  first  to  the  feet  of  Henry  Ward  Beecher, 
the  most  celebrated  spiritual  leader  in  all  America. 
What  bread  and  wine  did  Beecher  offer  to  the  unworldly* 
poet  in  him?  "Now  here,"  said  he — Mark  Twain  re- 
ports the  interview  in  one  of  his  letters,  ' '  now  here,  you 
are  one  of  the  talented  men  of  the  age — nobody  is  going 
to  deny  that — but  in  matters  of  business  I  don 't  suppose 
you  know  more  than  enough  to  come  in  when  it  rains. 
I'll  tell  you  what  to  do  and  how  to  do  it."  And  there- 
upon this  priest  of  the  ideal  sat  him  down  and  showed 
him  how  to  make  a  contract  for  "The  Innocents 
Abroad"  in  which  his  percentage  was  a  fifth  more  than 
the  most  opulent  publishing  house  in  the  country  had 
ever  paid  any  author  except  Horace  Greeley.  Such  were 
the  lessons  in  self-help  this  innocent  soul  received  from 
the  wise  men  of  statecraft,  literature  and  divinity. 

Thus  Mark  Twain  was  inducted  into  the  Gilded  Age, 
launched,  in  defiance  of  that  instinct  which  only  for  a 
few  years  was  to  allow  him  inner  peace,  upon  the  vast 
welter  of  a  society  blind  like  himself,  like  him  com- 
mitted to  the  pursuit  of  worldly  success. 
"'  That  in  becoming  a  humorist  he  had  relinquished  his 
independence  as  a  creative  spirit  we  can  see  from  his 
general  attitude  toward  his  career.  He  had  lapsed  for 


In  the  Crucible  95 

good  and  all  into  a  state  of  what  is  called  moral  in- 
fantility. "We  know  that  the  role  of  laugh-maker  had, 
from  early  adolescence,  come,  as  people  say,  natural  to 
him.  At  sixteen,  in  Hannibal,  when  he  told  the  story  of 
Jim  Wolfe  and  the  cats,  "his  hearers  laughed  immod- 
erately," says  Mr.  Paine,  "and  the  story-teller  was 
proud  and  happy  in  his  success."  At  twenty,  at  a 
printers'  banquet  in  Keokuk,  where  he  made  his  first 
after-dinner  speech,  his  humor  "delighted  his  audience, 
and  raised  him  many  points  in  the  public  regard." 
After  that,  he  found,  he  was  always  the  center  of  attrac- 
tion when  he  spoke  in  public.  It  is  significant,  however, 
that  from  all  his  triumphs  he  had  returned  faithfully  to 
his  work  as  a  printer,  just  as  later  he  had  held  so  pas- 
sionately to  the  guiding-line  of  his  trade  as  a  pilot. 
C That  persistent  adherence  of  his,  in  a  society  given  over 
to  exploitation,  to  a  metier  in  which  he  could  exercise 
the  instinct  of  workmanship,  of  craftsmanship,  is  the 
outstanding  fact  of  Mark  Twain's  adolescence.  It  was 
the  earnest  of  the  artist  in  him :  his  humor  was  the  line 
of  least  resistance.  When  he  adopted  humor  as  a  pro- 
fession, therefore,  he  was  falling  back  upon  a  line  he  had 
previously  rejected,  and  this  implied  that  he  had  ceased 
to  be  the  master  of  his  own  destiny.  In  short,  the 
artist  in  him  having  failed  to  take  the  helm,  he  had 
become  a  journalist,  and  his  career  was  now  at  the 
mercy  of  circumstance. 

Glance  forward  a  little.  After  the  triumph  of  "The 
Innocents  Abroad,"  he  wrote  to  his  publisher:  "I  have1: 
other  propositions  for  a  book,  but  have  doubted  the; 
propriety  of  interfering  with  good  newspaper  engage- 
ments, except  my  way  as  ah  author  could  be  demon- 
strated to  be  plain  before  me."  To  which  Mr.  Paine 
adds,  specifically:  "In  spite  of  the  immense  success  of. 
his  book — a  success  the  like  of  which  had  scarcely  been 
known  in  America — Mark  Twain  held  himself  to  be,  not; 
a  literary  man,  but  a  journalist.  He  had  no  plans  for 


96      [The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

another  book;  as  a  newspaper  owner  and  editor  he  ex- 
pected, with  his  marriage,  to  settle  down  and  devote  the 
rest  of  his  life  to  journalism."  Hardly  the  frame  of 
mind  of  the  writer  with  a  living  sense  of  his  vocation ! 
And  this  expressed  an  attitude  that  Mark  Twain  never 
outgrew.  Hear  Mr.  Paine  again,  at  the  time  of 
Clemens 's  fiftieth  year,  when  his  vital  powers  seem  to 
have  been  at  their  highest  point:  "As  Mark  Twain  in 
the  earlier  days  of  his  marriage  had  temporarily  put 
aside  authorship  to  join  in  a  newspaper  venture,  so  now 
again  literature  had  dropped  into  the  background,  had 
become  an  avocation,  while  financial  interests  pre- 
vailed." Financial  interests! — there  were  whole  years 
during  which  he  thought  of  hardly  anything  else. 

This  conception  of  his  literary  career  as  interchange- 
able, so  to  say,  with  his  financial  career  is  borne  out  by 
his  thoroughly  journalistic  attitude  toward  his  work. 
Thus  we  find  him  at  the  outset  proposing  to  "follow 
up"  his  success  with  the  story  of  the  "Hornet"  disaster 
with  a  series  of  articles  on  the  Sandwich  Islands,  and 
then  to  "take  advantage  of  the  popularity  of  the 
Hawaiian  letters  and  deliver  a  lecture  on  the  same  sub- 
ject. ' '  While  he  was  writing  ' '  Koughing  It "  he  planned 
a  book  of  adventures  in  the  diamond  mines  of  South 
Africa,  and  so  impersonal  was  this  work  that  he  pro- 
posed that  the  material  for  it  should  be  gathered  by  an 
agent,  whom  he  actually  despatched.  Then,  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "the  success  of  'Roughing  It'  naturally  made 
him  cast  about  for  other  autobiographical  material." 
Years  later,  after  the  failure  of  the  Paige  machine,  in 
which  he  had  invested  all  his  money,  we  find  him  return- 
ing to  literature  and  counting  up  his  "assets,"  exactly 
as  if  his  literary  life  were  indeed  a  business  enterprise. 
"I  confined  myself  to  the  boy-life  out  on  the  Missis- 
sippi," he  writes,  "because  that  had  a  peculiar  charm 
for  me,  and  not  because  I  was  not  familiar  with  other 
phases  of  life. ' '  And  then  he  enumerates  all  the  various 


In  the  Crucible  97 

roles  he  has  played,  concluding  that  "as  the  most  valu- 
able capital  or  culture  or  education  usable  in  the  build- 
ing of  novels  is  personal  experience  I  ought  to  be  well- 
equipped  for  that  trade. ' '  It  does  not  concern  him  that 
under  all  these  different  costumes  of  the  miner,  the 
prospector,  the  reporter,  the  publisher,  he  has  been  the 
same  man,  that  he  has  really  experienced  not  life  but 
only  modes  of  living:  the  costumes  are  all  different, 
and  each  one  is  good  for  a  new  performance.  It  is  not 
the  artist  but  the  salesman  that  speaks  here,  the  sales- 
man with  an  infallible  finger  for  the  public  pulse.  No 
more  lectures  in  churches,  he  tells  his  agent  Redpath: 
"People  are  afraid  to  laugh  in  a  church";  and  again,  to 
his  publishing  manager  regarding  "Pudfl'nhead  Wil- 
son": "There  was  nothing  new  in  that  story" — "The 
American  Claimant" — "but  the  finger-prints  in  this  one 
is  virgin  ground — absolutely  fresh,  and  mighty  curious 
and  interesting  to  everybody."  Mark  Twain,  who 
prophesied  a  sale  of  300,000  sets  of  General  Grant  '3 
"Memoirs"  and  then  proceeded  to  sell  almost  exactly 
that  number,  knew  very  well  what  the  public  wanted: 
that  had  become  his  chief  study.  Habitually,  in  connec- 
tion with  what  he  was  planning  to  do,  he  used  the  word 
"possibilities" — the  possibilities  of  this,  the  possibilities 
of  that — in  the  commercial,  not  in  the  artistic,  sense; 
he  appears  always  to  have  been  occupied  with  the  prom- 
ise of  profit  and  reputation  a  theme  contained  for  him, 
never  with  its  elements  of  artistic  interest  and  vali 
.That  authorship  was  to  him,  in  fact,  not  an  art  but  a 
'trade,  and  only  the  chief  trade  of  a  series  that  he  had/ 
^followed,  in  true  pioneer  fashion,  that  he  thought  of  it; 
not  as  a  means  of  free  individual  expression  but 
something  naturally  conditioned  by  the  laws  of  supply 
and  demand,  all  the  evidence  of  his  life  goes  to  show. 
I  have  quoted  his  eulogy  of  the  old  Mississippi  pilot  and 
his  description  of  the  writer,  by  contrast,  as  "a  man- 
acled servant -of  the  public":  "we  write  frankly  and 


98      The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

fearlessly,"  he  adds,  naively,  "but  then  we  'modify' 
before  we  print."  One  might  imagine  that  such  a  thing 
as  an  artist  had  never  existed. 

Am  I  anticipating?  Go  back  now;  go  back  to  1867, 
to  the  moment  of  Mark  Twain's  Cooper  Union  lecture, 
when  he  finds  himself,  in  the  hands  of  his  agent  Fuller, 
advertised  to  "play  against  Speaker  Colfax  at  Irving 
Hall,  Ristori,  and  also  the  double  troupe  of  Japanese 
jugglers."  Mark  Twain  hesitates.  Fuller  is  obdurate. 
"What  we  want  this  time,"  he  says,  "is  reputation  any- 
way— money  is  secondary. ' '  So  he  floods  the  house  with 
complimentary  tickets  to  the  school-teachers  of  the  city. 
"Mark,"  he  says,  after  the  lecture  is  over,  "Mark,  it's 
all  right.  The  fortune  didn't  come,  but  it  will.  The 
fame  has  arrived;  with  this  lecture  and  your  book  just 
out  you  are  going  to  be  the  most  talked  of  man  in  the 
country."  It  was  true.  But  in  that  moment — that 
typical  moment,  in  that  reluctance,  in  that  acquiescence, 
in  that  corroboration,  Mark  Twain's  die  had  been  cast. 
...  Who  is  this  apparition  we  see  "hobnobbing  with 
generals  and  senators  and  other  humbugs"?  The  Mark 
Twain  who  is  going  to  walk  the  boards  of  the  Gilded 
Age.  In  the  hour  of  his  triumph  he  writes  to  his 
mother:  "You  observe  that  under  a  cheerful  exterior  I 
have  got  a  spirit  that  is  angry  with  me  and  gives  me 
freely  its  contempt";  it  is  a  formidable  spirit,  that  alter 
ego  within  him, — he  is  going  to  hear  its  bitter  prompt- 
ings later  on.  Now,  however,  his  triumph  drowns  its 
voice :  his  private,  personal  and  domestic  interests  have 
wholly  supplanted  the  dim  and  wavering  sense  of  his 
vocation.  "Clemens  was  chiefly  concerned  over  two 
things,"  says  Mr.  Paine;  "he  wished  to  make  money 
and  he  wished  to  secure  a  government  appointment  for 
Orion." 

^  Mark  Twain  often  spoke  of  the  rigidity  of  determin- 
ism, of  the  inexorable  sequence  of  cause  and  effect.  As 
Mr.  Paine  says — with  an  emphasis  of  his  own — he  had 


In  the  Crucible  99 

but  to  review  his  own  life  for  justification  of  his  belief. 
From  this  point  on,  his  career  was  a  steady  process  of 
what  is  called  adaptation  to  environment.  He  had  ab- 
dicated that  spiritual  independence  without  which  the 
creative  life  is  impossible.  He  was  to  "lose  himself" 
now,  to  quote  Whitman's  phrase,  in  ''countless  masses 
of  adjustments." 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   CANDIDATE   FOB   GENTILITY 

"Follow  his  call?     Good  heavens!     That  is  what  men  do  as 
bachelors;  but  an  engaged  man  only  follows  his  bride." 

IBSEN:  The  Comedy  of  Love. 

THE  Free-Thinkers'  Society  in  "Pudd'nhead  Wil- 
son," as  I  have  recalled,  consisted  of  two  members, 
Judge  Driscoll,  the  president,  and  Pudd'nhead  himself. 
"Judge  Driscoll,"  says  our  author,  "could  be  a  free- 
thinker and  still  hold  his  place  in  society,  because  he 
was  the  person  of  most  consequence  in  the  community, 
and  therefore  could  venture  to  go  his  own  way  and 
follow  out  his  own  notions."  As  for  Pudd'nhead,  with 
his  crazy  calendar,  he  was  a  sort  of  outcast,  anyway; 
no  one  cared  a  straw  what  Pudd'nhead  believed.  It 
was  Mark  Twain's  little  paraphrase,  that  fable,  of 
Tocqueville  's  comment : ' '  I  know  of  no  country  in  which 
there  is  so  little  independence  of  mind  and  real  free- 
dom of  discussion  as  in  America."  Mark  Twain  has 
corroborated  this,  in  so  many  words,  himself:  "in  our 
country,"  he  says,  "we  have  those  three  unspeakably 
precious  things :  freedom  of  thought,  freedom  of  speech, 
and  the  prudence  never  to  practise  either."  An 
American  can  have  a  mind  of  his  own,  in  short,  upon 
one  of  two  conditions  only:  either  he  must  be  willing 
to  stay  at  the  bottom  of  the  ladder  of  success  or  he  must 
be  able  to  climb  to  the  top.  No  one  cares  to  impugn 
a  fool ;  no  one  dares  to  impugn  a  captain  of  industry. 

Now  when  Mark  Twain  abdicated  his  independence 
as  a  creative  spirit,  he  put  his  foot  on  the  first  rung 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     101 

of  that  ladder.  The  children  of  light  are  all  Pudd'n- 
heads  in  the  eyes  of  the  children  of  this  world,  and  if 
Mark  Twain  had  been  able  and  willing  to  remain  in  the 
ranks  of  the  children  of  light  he  would  have  been  per- 
fectly free — to  starve  and  to  shine.  But  once  he  had 
made  his  bid  for  success,  he  had  to  accept  its  moral 
consequences.  The  freedom  he  had  lost  at  the  foot  of 
the  ladder  he  could  hope  to  regain  only  at  the  top. 
Meanwhile  he  had  to  play  the  recognized  American 
game  according  to  the  recognized  American  rules. 

Here  Mark  Twain  was  utterly  at  sea.  His  essential 
instinct,  the  instinct  of  the  artist,  had  been  thwarted 
and  repressed.  Nevertheless,  just  because  he  was  es- 
sentially an  artist,  he  was  a  greenhorn  in  the  tricks 
of  getting  on.  Why,  it  was  a  constant  surprise  to  him 
at  first  that  people  laughed  at  his  stories  and  gave  him 
gold  and  silver  for  telling  them!  His  acquisitive  in- 
stinct, no  doubt,  had  asserted  itself  with  the  lapse  of 
his  creative  instinct;  still,  it  was  not,  so  to  speak,  a 
personal  instinct,  it  was  only  the  instinct  of  his  heredity 
and  his  environment  which  had  sprung  up  in  a  spirit 
that  had  been  swept  clear  for  it;  it  was  wholly  unable 
to  focus  Mark  Twain.  He,  all  his  life  the  most  inept 
of  business  men,  without  practical  judgment,  without 
foresight,  without  any  of  Poor  Richard's  virtues,  was 
"never,"  says  Mr.  Howells,  "a  man  who  cared  any- 
thing about  money  except  as  a  dream,  and  he  wanted 
more  and  more  of  it  to  fill  out  the  spaces  of  this 
dream."  Yes,  to  fill  out  the  spaces  the  prodigious  fail- 
ure of  his  genius  had  left  vacant!  To  win  fame  and 
fortune,  meanwhile,  as  his  parents  had  wished  him  to 
do,  had  now  become  his  dominant  desire,  and  almost 
every  one  he  met  knew  more  about  the  art  of  success 
than  he  did.  He  had  to  "make  good,"  but  in  order  to 
do  so  he  had  to  subject  himself  to  those  who  knew  the 
ropes.  Consequently,  whoever  excelled  him  in  skill,  in 
manners,  in  prestige,  stood  to  him  in  loco  parentis;  and. 


102     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

to  complete  the  ironic  circle,  he  was  endlessly  grateful 
to  those  who  led  him  about,  like  a  Savoyard  bear,  be- 
cause he  felt,  as  was  indeed  true,  that  it  was  to  them 
he  owed  the  success  he  had  attained.  This  is  the  real 
meaning  of  Mr.  Paine 's  remark:  "It  was  always  Mark 
Twain's  habit  to  rely  on  somebody." 

The  list  of  those  to  whom  he  deferred  is  a  long  and 
varied  one.  In  later  years,  "he  did  not  always  consult 
his  financial  adviser,  Mr.  Rogers,"  we  are  told,  "any 
more  than  he  always  consulted  his  spiritual  adviser 
Twitchell,  or  his  literary  adviser  Howells,  when  he 
intended  to  commit  heresies  in  their  respective  prov- 
inces." But  these  were  the  exceptions  that  proved 
the  rule :  in  general,  Mark  Twain  abandoned  himself  to 
the  will  and  word  of  those  who  had  won  his  allegiance. 
There  was  Artemus  Ward,  there  was  Anson  Burling- 
ame,  there  was  Henry  Ward  Beecher:  what  they  told 
him,  and  how  he  obeyed,  we  have  just  seen.  There 
was  Bret  Harte,  who,  he  said,  "trimmed  and  trained 
and  schooled  me  patiently  until  he  changed  me  from  an 
awkward  utterer  of  coarse  grotesquenesses  to  a  writer 
of  paragraphs  and  chapters  that  have  found  a  certain 
favor  in  the  eyes  of  even  some  of  the  very  decentest 
people  in  the  land."  Above  all,  and  among  many 
others,  there  was  Mr.  Howells,  who,  from  the  first  mo- 
ment, "won  his  absolute  and  unvarying  confidence  in 
all  literary  affairs":  indeed,  adds  Mr.  Paine,  "in  mat- 
ters pertaining  to  literature  and  to  literary  people  in 
general  he  laid  his  burden  on  William  Dean  Howells 
from  that  day."  It  was  to  Howells  that  he  said, 
apropos  of  "The  Innocents  Abroad":  "When  I  read 
that  review  of  yours  I  felt  like  the  woman  who  was  so 
glad  her  baby  had  come  white."  It  has  become  the 
custom  with  a  certain  school  of  critics  to  assert  that 
Mark  Twain's  spiritual  rights  were  in  some  way  in- 
fringed by  his  associates  and  especially  by  his  wife,  the 
evident  fact  being  that  he  craved  authority  with  all  the 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     103 

self -protective  instinct  of  the  child  who  has  not  learned 
safely  to  go  his  own  way  and  feels  himself  surrounded 
by  pitfalls.  "There  has  always  been  somebody  in. 
authority  over  my  manuscript  and  privileged  to  im- 
prove it,"  he  wrote  in  1900,  with  a  touch  of  angry 
chagrin,  to  Mr.  S.  S.  McClure.  But  the  privilege  had 
always  emanated  from  Mark  Twain  himself. 

In  short,  having  lost  the  thread  of  his  life  and  com-^  • 
mitted  himself  to  the  pursuit  of  prestige,  Mark  Twain  ,• 
had  to  adapt  himself  to  the  prevailing  point  of  view  of 
American  society.  "The  middle  class,"  says  a  contem-  f 
porary  English  writer,  Mr.  R.  H.  Gretton,  "is  that  por- 
tion of  the  community  to  which  money  is  the  primary 
condition  and  the  primary  instrument  of  life";  if  that 
is  true,  we  can  understand  why  Matthew  Arnold  ob- 
served that  the  whole  American  population  of  his  time 
belonged  to  the  middle  class.  When,  accordingly,  Mark 
Twain  accepted  the  spiritual  rule  of  the  majority,  he 
found  himself  leading,  to  use  an  expression  of  bridge- 
players,  from  his  weakest  suit.  It  was  not  as  a  young 
writer  capable  of  great  artistic  achievements  that  he 
was  valued  now,  but  as  a  promising  money-maker 
capable  of  becoming  a  plutocrat.  And  meanwhile,  in- 
stead of  being  an  interesting  individual,  he  was  a  social 
inferior.  His  uncouth  habits,  his  lack  of  education,  his 
outlandish  manners  and  appearance,  his  very  pietur- 
esqueness — everything  that  made  foreigners  delight  in 
him,  all  these  raw  materials  of  personality  that  would 
have  fallen  into  their  natural  place  if  he  had  been  able 
to  consummate  his  freedom  as  an  artist,  were  mill-stones 
about  the  neck  of  a  young  man  whose  salvation  de- 
pended upon  his  winning  the  approval  of  bourgeois 
society.  His  ' '  outrageousness, "  as  Mr.  Howells  calls 
it,  had  ceased  to  be  the  sign  of  some  priceless,  unformu- 
lated  force;  it  had  become  a  disadvantage,  a  disability, 
a  mere  outrageousness !  That  gift  of  humor  was  a  gold- 
mine— so  much  every  one  saw:  Mark  Twain  was  evi- 


104     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

dently  cut  out  for  success.  But  he  had  a  lot  of  things 
to  live  down  first!  He  was,  in  a  word,  a  "roughneck" 
from  the  West,  on  probation;  and  if  he  wanted  to  get 
on,  it  was  understood  that  he  had  to  qualify.  We  can- 
not properly  grasp  the  significance  of  Mark  Twain's 
marriage  unless  we  realize  that  he  had  been  maneuvered 
into  the  role  of  a  candidate  for  gentility. 

But  here,  in  order  to  go  forward,  we  shall  have  to 
go  back.  What  had  been  Mark  Twain's  original,  un- 
conscious motive  in  surrendering  his  creative  life?  To 
fulfill  the  oath  he  had  taken  so  solemnly  at  his  dead 
father's  side;  he  had  sworn  to  "make  good"  in  order 
to  please  his  mother.  In  short,  when  the  artist  in  him 
had  abdicated,  the  family  man,  in  whom  personal- and 
domestic  interests  and  relations  and  loyalties  take  pre- 
cedence of  all  others,  had  cone  to  the  front.  His  home 
had  ever  been  the  hub  of  Mark  Twain's  universe:  "deep 
down, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine,  of  the  days  of  his  first  triumphs 
in  Nevada,  "he  was  lonely  and  homesick;  he  was  al- 
ways so  away  from  his  own  kindred."  And  at  thirty- 
two,  able  to  go  back  to  his  mother  "without  shame," 
having  at  last  retrieved  his  failure  as  a  miner,  he  had 
renewed  the  peculiar  filial  bond  which  had  remained 
precisely  that  of  his  infancy.  Jane  Clemens  was  sixty- 
four  at  this  time,  we  are  told,  "but  as  keen  and  vigorous 
as  ever — proud  (even  if  somewhat  critical)  of  this 
handsome,  brilliant  man  of  new  name  and  fame  who 
had  been  her  mischievous,  wayward  boy.  She  petted 
him,  joked  with  him,  scolded  him,  and  inquired  search- 
ingly  into  his  morals  and  habits.  In  turn,  he  petted, 
comforted  and  teased  her.  She  decided  that  he  was  the 
same  Sam,  and  always  would  be — a  true  prophecy."  It 
was  indeed  so  true  that  Mark  Twain,  who  required 
/authority  as  much  as  he  required  affection,  could  not 
j  fail  now  to  seek  in  the  other  sex  some  one  who  would 
j  take  bis  mother's  place.  All  his  life,  as  we  know,  he 
had  to  be  mothered  by  somebody,  and  he  transferred 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     105 

this  filial  relation  to  at  least  one  other  person  before  it 
found  its  bourn  first  in  his  wife  and  afterward  in  his 
daughters.  This  was  "Mother"  Fairbanks  of  the 
Quaker  City  party,  who  had,  we  are  told,  so  large 
an  influence  on  the  tone  and  character  of  those  travel 
letters  which  established  his  fame.  ' '  She  sewed  my  but- 
tons on,"  he  wrote — he  was  thirty-two  at  the  time — 
"kept  my  clothing  in  presentable  form,  fed  me  on 
Egyptian  jam  (when  I  behaved),  lectured  me  awfully 
.  .  .  and  cured  me  of  several  bad  habits."  It  was  only 
natural,  therefore,  that  he  should  have  accepted  the  rule 
of  his  wife  ' '  implicitly, ' '  that  he  should  have  ' '  gloried, ' ' 
as  Mr.  Howells  says,  in  his  subjection  to  her.  "After 
my  marriage,"  he  told  Professor  Henderson,  "she 
edited  everything  I  wrote.  And  what  is  more — she  not 
only  edited  my  works — she  edited  me ! "  What,  indeed, 
were  Mark  Twain's  works  in  the  totality  of  that  rela- 
tionship ?  What,  for  that  matter,  was  Olivia  Clemens  ? 
She  was  more  than  a  person,  she  was  a  symbol.  After 
her  death  Mark  Twain  was  always  deploring  the  respon- 
sibility he  had  been  to  her.  Does  he  not  fall  into  the 
actual  phrase  his  mother  had  used  about  him? — "she 
always  said  I  was  the  most  difficult  child  she  had. ' '  She 
was,  I  say,  more  than  a  person,  she  was  a  symbol;  for 
just  as  she  had  taken  the  place  of  his  mother,  so  at  her 
death  her  daughters  took  her  place.  Mr.  Paine  tells 
how,  when  Mark  Twain  was  seventy  or  more,  Miss  Clara 
Clemens,  leaving  home  for  a  visit,  would  pin  up  a  sign 
on  the  billiard-room  door :  ' '  No  billiards  after  10  P.  M. ' ' 
— a  sign  that  was  always  outlawed.  "He  was  a  boy," 
Mr.  Paine  says,  "whose  parents  had  been  called  away, 
left  to  his  own  devices,  and- bent  on  a  good  time."  He 
used  to  complain  humorously  how  his  daughters  were 
always  trying  to  keep  him  straight — "dusting  papa 
off,"  as  they  called  it,  and  how,  wherever  he  went,  little 
notes  and  telegrams  of  admonition  followed  him.  "I 
have  been  used,"  he  said,  "to  obeying  my  family  all  my 


io6     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

life."  And  by  virtue  of  this  lovable  weakness,  too,  he 
was  the  typical  American  male. 

As  we  can  see  now,  it  was  affection  rather  than  ma- 
terial self-interest  that  was  leading  Mark  Twain  on- 
'•  ward  and  upward.  It  had  always  been  affection!  He 
had  never  at  bottom  wanted  to  "make  good"  for  any 
other  reason  than  to  please  his  mother,  and  in  order  to 
get  on  he  had  had  to  adopt  his  mother 's  values  of  life ; 
he  had  had  to  repress  the  deepest  instinct  in  him  and 
accept  the  guidance  of  those  who  knew  the  ropes  of 
success.  As  the  ward  of  his  mother,  he  had  never  con- 
sciously broken  with  the  traditions  of  Western  society. 
Now,  a  candidate  for  gentility  on  terms  wholly  foreign 
to  his  nature,  he  found  the  filial  bond  of  old  renewed 
with  tenfold  intensity  in  a  fresh  relationship.  He  had 
to  "make  good''  in  his  wife's  eyes,  and  that  was  a  far 
more  complicated  obligation.  As  we  shall  see,  Mark 
Twain  rebelled  against  her  will,  just  as  he  had  rebelled 
against  his  mother's,  yet  could  not  seriously  or  finally 
question  anything  she  thought  or  did.  "He  adored  her 
as  little  less  than  a  saint,"  we  are  told:  which  is  only 
another  way  of  saying  that,  automatically,  her  gods  had 
become  his. 

It  is  not  the  custom  in  American  criticism  to  discuss 
the  relations  between  authors  and  their  wives:  so  in- 
tensely personal  is  the  atmosphere  of  our  society  that  to 
"stoop  and  botanize"  upon  the  family  affairs  even  of 
those  whose  lives  and  opinions  give  its  tone  to  our  civili- 
zation is  regarded  as  a  sort  of  sacrilege.  Think  of  the 
way  in  which  English  criticism  has  thrashed  out  the 
pros  and  cons  of  Thomas  and  Jane  Carlyle,  Percy  and 
Harriet  Shelley,  Lord  and  Lady  Byron,  and  the 
Bronte  family  and  the  Lambs  and  the  Rossettis!  Is  it 
to  satisfy  the  neighborly  village  ear  or  even  a  mere  nor- 
mal concern  with  interesting  relationships?  At  bottom 
English  critics  are  so  copious  and  so  candid  in  these 
domestic  analyses  because  they  believe  that  what  great 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     107 

writers  think  and  feel  is  of  profound  importance  to  so- 
ciety and  because  they  know  that  what  any  man  thinks 
and  feels  is  largely  determined  by  personal  circum- 
stances and  affections.  It  is,  no  doubt,  because  of  this 
frank,  free  habit  of  mind  that  all  the  best  biographies 
even  of  our  American  worthies — Hamilton,  Franklin 
and  Lincoln,  for  instance — have  been  written  by  Eng- 
lishmen! No  one  will  deny,  I  suppose,  that  Mark 
Twain's  influence  upon  our  society  has  been,  either  in  a 
positive  or  in  a  negative  way,  profound.  When,  there- 
fore, we  know  that,  by  his  own  statement,  his  wife  not 
only  edited  his  works  but  edited  him,  we  feel  slightly 
annoyed  with  Mr.  Howells  who,  whenever  he  speaks  of 
Mrs.  Clemens,  abandons  his  role  as  a  realist  and  care- 
fully conceals  that  puissant  personage  under  the  veil 
of  "her  heavenly  whiteness."  We  feel  that  the  friend, 
the  neighbor,  the  guest  has  prevailed  in  Mr.  Howells 's 
mind  over  the  artist  and  the  thinker  and  that  he  is  far 
more  concerned  with  fulfilling  his  personal  obligations 
and  his  private  loyalties  than  the  proper  public  task  of 
a  psychologist  and  a  man  of  letters.  Meanwhile,  we 
know  that  neither  the  wives  of  European  authors  nor, 
for  that  matter,  the  holy  women  of  the  New  Testament 
have  suffered  any  real  degradation  from  being  scru- 
tinized as  creatures  of  flesh  and  blood.  If  one  stoops 
and  botanizes  upon  Mrs.  Clemens  it  is  because,  when 
her  standards  became  those  of  her  husband,  she  stepped 
immediately  into  a  role  far  more  truly  influential  than 
that  of  any  President. 

Olivia  Langdon  was  the  daughter  of  "a  wealthy  coal- 
dealer  and  mine-owner"  of  Elmira,  New  York.  Per- 
haps you  know  Elmira?  Perhaps,  in  any  case,  you  can 
imagine  it?  Those  "up-State"  towns  have  a  civiliza- 
tion all  their  own :  without  the  traditions  of  moral  free- 
dom and  intellectual  culture  which  New  England  has 
never  quite  lost,  they  had  been  so  salted  down  with  the 
spoils  of  a  conservative  industrial  life  that  they  had  at- 


io8     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

tained,  by  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  social 
stratification  as  absolute  as  that  of  New  England  itself. 
A  stagnant,  fresh -water  aristocracy,  one  and  seven- 
eighths  or  two  and  a  quarter  generations  deep,  densely 
provincial,  resting  on  a  basis  of  angular  sectarianism, 
eviscerated  politics  and  raw  money,  ruled  the  roast,  im- 
posing upon  all  the  rest  of  society  its  own  type,  forcing 
all  to  submit  to  it  or  to  imitate  it.  Who  does  not  know 
those  august  brick-and-stucco  Mansard  palaces  of  the 
Middle  States,  those  fountains  on  the  front  lawn  that 
have  never  played,  those  bronze  animals  with  their  per- 
manent but  economical  suggestions  of  the  baronial  park? 
The  quintessence  of  thrifty  ostentation,  a  maximum  of 
terrifying  effect  based  upon  a  minimum  of  psychic  ex- 
penditure !  They  are  the  Vaticans  of  the  coal-popes  of 
yesteryear,  and  all  the  Elmiras  with  a  single  voice  pro- 
claimed them  sacrosanct. 

We  can  imagine  how  Mark  Twain  must  have  been 
struck  dumb  in  such  a  presence.  "Elmira,"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "was  a  conservative  place — a  place  of  pedigree 
and  family  tradition ;  that  a  stranger,  a  former  printer, 
pilot,  miner,  wandering  journalist  and  lecturer,  was  to 
carry  off  the  daughter  of  one  of  the  oldest  and  wealthi- 
est families,  was  a  thing  not  to  be  lightly  permitted.  The 
fact  that  he  had  achieved  a  national  fame  did  not  count 
against  other  considerations.  The  social  protest 
amounted  almost  to  insurrection."  One  remembers  the 
story  of  Thomas  Carlyle,  that  Scottish  stone-mason's 
son,  who  carried  off  the  daughter  of  Dr.  Welsh  of  Dum- 
fries. One  conceives  what  Carlyle 's  position  would  have 
been  if  he  had  not  found  his  own  soul  before  he  fell  in 
love,  and  if  Jane  Welsh  had  been  merely  the  passive 
reflection  of  a  society  utterly  without  respect  for  the  life 
of  the  spirit.  He  would  have  been,  and  would  have 
felt  himself,  the  interloper  then — he  would  not  have 
been  Carlyle  but  the  stone-mason's  son,  and  she  would 
have  been  the  Lady  Bountiful.  For  Mark  Twain  had 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     109 

not  married  an  awakened  soul;  he  had  married  a 
young  girl  without  experience,  without  imagination, 
who  had  never  questioned  anj^thing,  understood  any- 
thing, desired  anything,  who  had  never  been  conscious 
of  any  will  apart  from  that  of  her  parents,  her  rela- 
tives, her  friends.  To  win  her  approval  and  her  pride, 
therefore — and  love  compelled  him  to  do  that — he 
had  to  win  the  approval  and  the  pride  of  Elmira 
itself,  he  had  to  win  the  imprimatur  of  all  that  vast 
and  intricate  system  of  privilege  and  convention  of 
which  Elmira  was  the  symbol.  They  had  all  said  of 
Olivia  Langdon,  who  was  the  "family  idol,"  that  "no 
one  was  good  enough  for  her — certainly  not  this  adven- 
turous soldier  of  letters  from  the  West."  Charles 
Langdon,  her  brother  and  Mark  Twain's  old  comrade, 
was  so  mortified  at  having  brought  this  ignominy  upon 
his  own  household,  that  he  set  off  on  a  voyage  round 
the  world  in  order  to  escape  the  wedding.  Further- 
more, Mark  Twain 's  friends  in  California  replied  unani- 
mously to  Mr.  Lang'don's  enquiries  about  his  character, 
that,  while  he  was  certainly  a  good  fellow,  he  would 
make  the  ''worst  husband  on  record."  Would  not  all 
these  things  have  put  any  lover  on  his  mettle? 

Mark  Twain  was  on  probation,  and  his  provisional 
acceptability  in  this  new  situation  was  due  not  to  his 
genius  but  to  the  5'act  that  he  was  able  to  make  money 
by  it.  What  made  the  Langdons  relent  and  consider  his 
candidacy  was  quite  plainly,  as  we  can  see  from  Mr. 
Paine 's  record,  the  vast  success  Mark  Twain  was  hav- 
ing as  a  humorous  journalist  and  lecturer.  With  the 
publication  of  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  as  we  know, 
"he  had  become  suddenly  a  person  of  substance — an 
associate  of  men  of  consequence":  even  in  New  York 
people  pointed  him  out  in  the  street.  He  was  a  lion,  a 
conquering  hero,  and  Elmira  could  not  help  yielding  to 
that:  "it  would  be  difficult,"  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "for 
any  family  to  refuse  relationship  with  one  whose  star  wa§ 


no    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

so  clearly  ascending."  But  could  he,  would  he,  keep  it 
up?  To  be  sure,  he  considered  himself,  we  are  specifi- 
cally told,  not  as  a  literary  man  but  as  a  journalist ;  his 
financial  pace  had  been  set  for  him;  "I  wasn't  going 
to  touch  a  book,"  he  wrote,  "unless  there  was  money 
in  it,  and  a  good  deal  of  it";  he  had  already  formed 
those  habits  of  "pecuniary  emulation"  and  "conspicu- 
ous waste"  which  Mr.  Veblen  has  defined  for  us  and 
which  were  almost  a  guarantee  that  he  would  take  a 
common-sense  view  of  his  talent  and  turn  it  to  the  best 
financial  account ;  three  months  before  his  marriage, 
this  erstwhile  barefoot  boy  was  already — the  best  pos- 
sible omen  for  one  with  his  resources — $22,000  in  debt! 
He  had  put  his  shoulder  to  the  wheel  and  had  proved 
that  he  was  able  to  make  money  even  faster  than  he 
spent  it;  and  the  instincts  of  the  family  man  had  so 
manifested  themselves  in  his  new  devotion  that,  other 
things  being  equal — and  his  wife  would  see  to  that — > 
he  really  was  a  safe,  conservative  risk  as  a  wealthy  coal- 
dealer 's  son-in-law.  Jervis  Langdon  capitulated:  he 
was  a  hearty  soul,  he  had  always  liked  Mark  Twain, 
anyway;  now  he  felt  that  this  soldier  of  fortune  could 
be  trusted  to  cherish  his  daughter  in  the  style,  as  people 
say,  to  which  she  had  been  accustomed.  His  own  house- 
hold expenses  were  $40,000  a  year:  of  course  they 
couldn't  begin  on  that  scale;  it  wasn't  to  be  expected, 
and  besides,  it  wasn't  the  custom.  But,  at  any  rate,  he 
was  going  to  start  them  off,  and  he  was  going  to  do  it 
handsomely.  One  remembers  how,  in  "The  Gilded  AgV' 
when  Philip  Sterling  conquers  the  mountain  of  coal 
that  makes  his  fortune,  he  "became  suddenly  a  person 
of  consideration,  whose  speech  was  freighted  with  mean- 
ing, whose  looks  were  all  significant.  The  words  of  a 
proprietor  of  a  rich  coal  mine,"  our  author  adds, 
naively,  "have  a  golden  sound,  and  his  common  sayings 
are  repeated  as  if  they  were  solid  wisdom."  Mark 
Twain  must  have  had  Jervis  Langdon  in  his  mind  when 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     in 

he  "wrote  that:  as  an  aspirant  to  fortune,  he  naturally 
stood  in  awe  of  a  man  who  had  so  conspicuously 
arrived,  and  now  that  this  man  had  become  his  own 
bountiful  father-in-law  he  could  not,  in  his  gratitude, 
sufficiently  pledge  himself  to  keep  his  best  financial  foot 
forward.  Jervis  Langdon  gave  the  young  couple  a  house 
in  a  fashionable  street  in  Buffalo,  a  house  newly  and 
fully  fitted  up,  with  a  carriage  and  a  coachman  and 
all  the  other  appointments  of  a  prosperous  menage.  It 
was  a  surprise,  one  of  the  unforeseen  delights  of  Mark 
Twain's  wedding  day! — he  woke  up,  so  to  speak,  and 
found  himself,  with  the  confused  and  intoxicating  sen- 
sations of  a  bridegroom,  absolutely  committed  to  a  scale 
of  living  such  as  no  mere  literary  man  at  the  outset  of 
his  career  could  ever  have  lived  up  to.  He  had  been 
fairly  shanghaied  into  the  business  man 's  paradise ! 
But  Jervis  Langdon  had  foreseen  everything.  Mark 
Twain's  ambition  at  this  time,  we  are  told,  "lay  in  the 
direction  of  retirement  in  some  prosperous  newspaper 
enterprise,  with  the  comforts  and  companionship  of  a 
home."  That  was  the  ambition,  already  evoked,  which 
his  new  situation  confirmed,  the  ambition  which  had 
now  fully  become  his  because  the  Langdons  encouraged 
it.  And  as  he  had  no  money  actually  on  hand,  his 
father-in-law  bound  himself  to  the  extent  of  $25,000 
and  advanced  half  of  it  in  cash  so  that  Mark  Twain 
could  acquire  a  third  interest  in  the  Buffalo  Express. 
Thus,  almost  without  realizing  it,  he  had  actually  be- 
come a  business  man,  with  love  and  honor  obliging  him 
to  remain  one. 

The  full  consequences  of  this  moral  surrender — shall 
we  call  it? — can  only  appear  as  we  go  on  with  our 
story.  Meanwhile,  we  may  note  t.iat,  precisely  because 
of  his  divided  soul,  Mark  Twain  could  not  consistently 
and  deliberately  pursue  the  main  chance.  Had  he  been 
able  to  do  so  he  might,  in  a  few  years,  have  bought  his 
liberty;  but  he  lost  interest  in  his  journalistic  enter- 


112     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

prise  just  as  he  was  to  lose  interest  in  so  many  other 
lucrative  enterprises  in  the  future.  And  every  time  he 
was  driven  back  to  make  a  fresh  attempt.  "I  have  a 
perfect  horror  and  heart-sickness  over  it,"  Mrs. 
Clemens  wrote  to  her  sister  after  the  bankruptcy  of  the 
publishing  house  of  Charles  L.  Webster  and  Co.  "I 
cannot  get  away  from  the  feeling  that  business  failure 
means  disgrace.  I  suppose  it  always  will  mean  that 
to  me.  Sue,  if  you  were  to  see  me  you  would  see  that 
I  have  grown  old  very  fast  during  this  last  year :  I  have 
wrinkled.  Most  of  the  time  I  want  to  lie  down  and  cry. 
Everything  seems  to  me  so  impossible."  Naturally,  in- 
evitably ;  but  imagine  an  author,  who  was  also  a  devoted 
lover,  having  to  respond  to  a  stimulus  like  that!  His 
bankruptcy  was,  to  Mark  Twain,  like  a  sudden  dawn  of 
joyous  freedom.  "Farewell — a  long  farewell — to  busi- 
ness!" he  exclaimed  during  those  weeks  of  what  might 
have  seemed  an  impending  doom.  "I  will  never  touch 
it  again!  I  will  live  in  literature,  I  will  wallow  in  it, 
revel  in  it;  I  will  swim  in  ink!"  But  when  his  release 
finally  comes  he  writes  as  follows  to  his  wife,  whom  he 
has  left  in  France:  "Now  and  then  a  good  and  dear 
Joe  Twitehell  or  Susy  Warner  condoles  with  me  and 
says,  'Cheer  up — don't  be  downhearted'  .  .  .  and  none 
of  them  suspect  what  a  burden  has  been  lifted  from  me 
and  how  blithe  I  am  inside.  Except  when  I  think  of 
you,  dear  heart — then  I  am  not  blithe ;  for  I  seem  to  see 
you  grieving  and  ashamed,  and  dreading  to  look  people 
in  the  face.  .  .  .  You  only  seem  to  see  rout,  retreat,  and 
dishonored  colors  dragging  in  the  dirt — whereas  none 
of  these  things  exist.  There  is  temporary  defeat,  but 
no  dishonor — and  we  will  march  again.  Charley  War- 
ner said  to-day,  'Sho,  Livy  isn't  worrying.  So  long  as 
she's  got  you  and  the  children  she  doesn't  care  what 
happens.  She  knows  it  isn't  her  affair.'  Which  didn't 
convince  me!"  No,  Mrs.  Clemens,  who  was  so  far  from 
being  the  votary  of  genius,  was  not  quite  the  votary  of 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     113 

love  either ;  she  was,  before  all,  the  unquestioning  daugh- 
ter of  that  "wealthy  coal-dealer"  of  Elmira,  who  had 
"held  about  a  quarter  of  a  million  in  her  own  right"; 
her  husband  might  lag  and  lapse  as  a  literary  man,  but  V 
when  he  fell  behind  in  the  race  of  pecuniary  emula- 
tion she  could  not  help  applying  the  spur.  She  had 
even  invested  her  own  patrimony  in  her  husband's  ven- 
tures, and  all  that  the  Paige  Typesetting  Machine  had 
spared  went  up  the  chimney  in  the  failure  of  Charles 
L.  Webster  and  Co.  Of  course  Mark  Twain  had  to  re- 
trieve that !  And  so  it  went :  as  the  years  passed,  owing 
to  the  very  ineptitude  that  ought  to  have  kept  him  out 
of  business  altogether,  he  was  involved  more  and  more 
deeply  in  it. 

As  we  can  see  now,  the  condition  of  Mark  Twain's  / 
survival,  on  probation  as  he  was  and  morally  pledged 
to  make  a  large  income,  was  that  he  should  adopt  the 
whole  code  of  his  new  environment.  It  was  for  love's 
sake  that  he  had  put  his  head,  so  to  say,  into  the  noose ; 
in  his  case  the  matrimonial  vow  had  been  almost  lite- 
rally reversed  and  it  was  he  who  had  promised  not  only 
to  love  and  honor  but  also  to  obey.  His  loyalty  was 
laid  under  further  obligations  by  certain  family  disas- 
ters that  followed  his  marriage  and  by  the  weakness  of 
his  wife.  A  neurotic,  hysterical  type — at  sixteen, 
through  a  fall  upon  the  ice,  she  had  become  a  complete 
invalid,  confined  to  her  bed  for  two  years  in  a  darkened 
room,  unable  to  sit,  even  when  supported,  unable  to  lie 
in  any  position  except  upon  her  back  till  a  wizard  came 
one  day  and  told  her,  with  miraculous  results,  to  arise 
and  walk — Mrs.  Clemens  was  of  an  almost  unearthly 
fragility,  and  she  seems  to  have  remained  so  during 
the  greater  part  of  her  life.  "I  am  still  nursing  Livy 
night  and  day.  I  am  nearly  worn  out,"  Mark  Twain 
writes,  shortly  after  his  marriage;  and  the  death  of 
their  first  child,  not  long  after,  naturally  intensified  his 
almost  abnormal  absorption  in  domestic  interests,  his 


H4    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

already  excessive  devotion  to  his  wife.  We  recall  that 
passionate  promise  he  had  made  to  his  brother:  "I  am 
in  for  it.  I  must  go  on  chasing  [phantoms]  until  I 
marry,  then  I  am  done  with  literature  and  all  other 
bosh — that  is,  literature  wherewith  to  please  the  general 
public.  I  shall  write  to  please  myself  then."  What 
chance  did  he  have  now,  preoccupied  at  home,  driven 
to  support  the  pretentious  establishment  his  father-in- 
law  had  wished  on  him,  to  find  his  own  bearings  and 
write  to  please  that  "self"  which  had  never  possessed 
any  truly  conscious  existence  ?  The  whole'  tenor  of  this 
new  life  was  to  feminize  Mark  Twain,  to  make  him  feel 
that  no  loyalties  are  valid  which  conflict  with  domestic 
loyalties,  that  no  activities  are  admirable  which  do  not 
immediately  conduce  to  domestic  welfare,  that  private 
and  familiar  interests  are,  rightly  and  inevitably,  the 
prime  interests  of  man. 

"Eve's  Diary,"  written  by  Mark  Twain  shortly  after 
his  wife's  death,  is  said  to  figure  their  relationship: 
Adam  there  is  the  hewer  of  wood  and  the  drawer  of 
water,  a  sort  of  Caliban,  and  Eve  the  arbiter  in  all  mat- 
ters of  civilization.  "It  has  low  tastes,"  says  Beauty 
of  this  Beast.  "Some  instinct  tells  me  that  eternal 
vigilance  is  the  price  of  supremacy."  And  how  Mrs. 
Clemens  exercised  it!  There  is  something  for  the  gods 
to  bewail  in  the  sight  of  that  shorn  Samson  led  about 
by  a  little  child  who,  in  the  profound  somnolence  of 
her  spirit,  was  merely  going  through  the  motions  of  an 
inherited  domestic  piety.  "Her  life  had  been  circum- 
scribed," says  Mr.  Paine,  "her  experiences  of  a  simple 
sort";  but  she  did  not  hesitate  to  undertake  "the  work 
of  polishing  and  purifying  her  life  companion.  She  had 
no  wish  to  destroy  his  personality,  to  make  him  over, 
but  only  to  preserve  his  best,  and  she  set  about  it  in 
the  right  way — gently,  and  with  a  tender  gratitude  in 
each  achievement."  To  preserve  his  best!  "She  sensed 
his  heresy  toward  the  conventions  and  forms  which  had 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     115 

been  her  gospel;  his  bantering,  indifferent  attitude 
toward  life — to  her  always  so  serious  and  sacred;  she 
suspected  that  he  even  might  have  unorthodox  views  on 
matters  of  religion."  That  was  before  they  were  mar- 
ried: afterward,  "concerning  his  religious  observances 
her  task  in  the  beginning  was  easy  enough.  Clemens 
had  not  at  that  time  formulated  any  particular  doc- 
trines of  his  own.  ...  It  took  very  little  persuasion  on 
his  wife's  part  to  establish  family  prayers  in  their 
home,  grace  before  meals,  and  the  morning  reading  of  a 
Bible  chapter."  Thus  was  reestablished  over  him  that 
old  Calvinistic  spell  of  his  mother's,  against  which  he 
had  so  vainly  revolted  as  a  child:  preserving  his  "best," 
as  we  can  see,  meant  preserving  what  fitted  into  the 
scheme  of  a  good  husband,  a  kind  father  and  a  sagacious 
man  of  business  after  the  order  of  the  Jervis  Langdons 
of  this  world,  for  Olivia  Clemens  had  never  known  any 
other  sort  of  hero.  "In  time,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  with  a 
terrible  unconscious  irony,  "she  saw  more  clearly  with 
his  vision,  but  this  was  long  after,  when  she  had  lived 
more  with  the  world,  had  become  more  familiar  with  its 
larger  needs,  and  the  proportions  of  created  things."  It 
was  too  late  then;  the  mischief  had  long  been  done. 
Mark  Twain  frightened  his  wife  and  shocked  her,  and 
she  prevailed  over  him  by  an  almost  deliberate  reliance 
upon  that  weakness  to  which  he,  the  chivalrous  South- 
erner— the  born  cavalier,  in  reality — could  not  fail  to 
respond.  Why  did  she  habitually  call  him  "Youth"? 
Was  it  not  from  an  instinctive  sense  that  her  power  lay 
in  keeping  him  a  child,  in  asserting  the  maternal  atti- 
tude which  he  could  never  resist?  He  had  indeed 
found  a  second  mother  now,  and  he  "not  only  accepted 
her  rule  implicitly,"  as  Mr.  Ho  wells  says,  "but  he  re- 
joiced, he  '-loried  in  it."  He  teased  her,  he  occasionally 
enjoyed  "shivering"  her  "exquisite  sense  of  decorum"; 
but  he,  who  could  not  trust  his  own  judgment  and  to 
whom,  consequently,  one  taboo  was  as  reasonable  as  an- 


Ii6    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

other,  submitted  to  all  her  taboos  as  a  matter  of  course. 
"I  would  quit  wearing  socks,"  he  said,  "if  she  thought 
them  immoral." 

It  was,  this  marriage,  as  we  perceive,  a  case  of  the 
blind  leading  the  blind.  Mark  Twain  had  thrown  him- 
self into  the  hands  of  his  wife ;  she,  in  turn,  was  merely 
the  echo  of  her  environment.  "She  was  very  sensitive 
about  me,"  he  wrote  in  his  Autobiography.  "It  dis- 
tressed her  to  see  me  do  heedless  things  which  could 
bring  me  under  criticism."  That  was  partly,  of  course, 
because  she  wished  him  to  succeed  for  his  own  sake, 
but  it  was  also  because  she  was  not  sure  of  herself.  "We 
can  see,  between  the  lines  of  Mr.  Paine 's  record,  not 
only  what  a  shy  little  provincial  body  she  was,  how 
easily  thrown  out  of  her  element,  how  ill-at-ease  in  their 
journeyings  about  the  world,  but  how  far  from  unambi- 
tious she  was  also.  It  was  for  her  own  sake,  there- 
fore, that  she  trimmed  him  and  tried  to  turn  Caliban 
into  a  gentleman.  Timid  and  ambitious  as  she  was,  hav- 
ing annexed  him  to  herself  she  had  to  make  him  as  pre- 
sentable as  possible  in  order  to  satisfy  her  own  vanity 
before  the  eyes  of  those  upon  whose  approval  her  hap- 
piness depended.  Mark  Twain  told  once  of  the  torture 
of  embarrassment  with  which  she  had  had  to  confess  at 
a  London  dinner-table  that  he,  the  great  American 
author,  had  never  read  Balzac,  Thackeray,  "and  the 
others. ' '  But  Boston,  from  the  point  of  view  of  Elmira, 
was  almost  as  awe-inspiring  as  London.  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Clemens  were  often  the  guests  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Howells. 
Here  is  what  Mark  Twain  wrote  to  Howells  after  one 
of  these  visits:  "I  'caught  it'  for  letting  Mrs.  Howells 
bother  and  bother  about  her  coffee,  when  it  was  'a  good 
deal  better  than  we  get  at  home.'  I  'caught  it'  for 
interrupting  Mrs.  C.  at  the  last  moment  and  losing  her 
the  opportunity  to  urge  you  not  to  forget  to  send  her 
that  MS.  when  the  printers  are  done  with  it.  I  'caught 
it'  once  more  for  personating  that  drunken  Colonel 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     117 

James.  I  'caught  it'  for  mentioning  that  Mr.  Longfel- 
low's picture  was  slightly  damaged;  and  when,  after  a 
lull  in  the  storm,  I  confessed,  shamefacedly,  that  I  had 
privately  suggested  to  you  that  we  hadn't  any  frames, 
and  that  if  you  wouldn  't  mind  hinting  to  Mr.  Houghton, 
etc.,  etc.,  etc.,  the  madam  was  simply  speechless  for  the 
space  of  a  minute.  Then  she  said:  'How  could  you, 
Youth !  The  idea  of  sending  Mr.  Howells,  with  his  sen- 
sitive nature,'  "  etc.  She  was  on  pins  and  needles,  we 
see,  and  it  must  have  been  intolerable  to  her  that,  at  the 
Atlantic  dinners,  her  husband,  in  spite  of  his  im- 
mense fame,  sat  below  the  salt :  her  whole  innocent  mood 
was  that  of  a  woman  to  whom  the  values  of  that  good 
society  which,  as  Goethe  said,  offers  no  material  for 
poetry,  are  the  supreme,  unquestionable  values  and  who 
felt  that  she  and  her  brood  must  at  all  hazards  learn  the 
ropes.  Mark  Twain,  after  the  enormous  break  of  his 
Whittier  Birthday  speech,  wrote  to  Mr.  Howells:  "My 
sense  of  disgrace  does  not  abate.  It  grows.  I  see  that 
it  is  going  to  add  itself  to  my  list  of  permanencies,  a 
list  of  humiliations  that  extends  back  to  when  I  was 
seven  years  old,  and  which  keeps  on  persecuting  me  re- 
gardless of  my  repentances."  Imagine  a  European 
man  of  genius  having  to  qualify,  not  as  an  individual, 
but  as  a  member  of  a  social  order  into  which  he  had 
not  been  born !  Charles  Dickens  never  felt  grateful  to 
society  because  it  tolerated  the  man  who  had  once  been 
a  waif  of  the  streets:  Mark  Twain,  as  Mr.  Paine  pre- 
sents him,  was  always  the  barefoot  boy  among  the  gods. 
Only  in  the  light  of  this  general  subjugation  of  Mark 
Twain's  character  can  we  understand  his  literary  sub- 
jugation. From  the  moment  of  his  marriage  his  artistic 
integrity,  already  compromised,  had,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  been  irreparably  destroyed:  quite  literally,  as  a 
man  of  letters,  his  honor  rooted  in  dishonor  stood  and 
faith  unfaithful  kept  him  falsely  true.  He  had  ac- 
cepted his  father-in-law's  financial  assistance;  he  had 


Ii8     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

bought  his  post  on  the  Buffalo  Express;  in  return,  he 
had  solemnly  pledged  the  freedom  of  his  mind.  In 
these  words  of  his  Salutatory  he  made  his  pledge  public : 
"Being  a  stranger  it  would  be  immodest  for  me  to  sud- 
denly and  violently  assume  the  associate  editorship  of 
the  Buffalo  Express  without  a  single  word  of  comfort 
or  encouragement  to  the  unoffending  patrons  of  this 
paper,  who  are  about  to  be  exposed  to  constant  attacks 
of  my  wisdom  and  learning.  But  the  word  shall  be  as 
brief  as  possible.  I  only  want  to  assure  parties  having 
a  friendly  interest  in  the  prosperity  of  the  journal  that 
I  am  not  going  to  hurt  the  paper  deliberately  and  in- 
tentionally at  any  time.  I  am  not  going  to  introduce 
any  startling  reforms,  nor  in  any  way  attempt  to  make 
trouble.  .  .  .  Such  is  my  platform.  I  do  not  see  any 
use  in  it,  but  custom  is  law  and  must  be  obeyed." 
Never,  surely,  was  a  creative  will  more  innocently,  more 
painlessly  surrendered  than  in  those  words;  marriage 
had  been,  for  Mark  Twain's  artistic  conscience,  like  the 
final  whiff  of  chloroform  sealing  a  slumber  that  many 
a  previous  whiff  had  already  induced.  With  that  prom- 
ise to  be  "good,"  to  refrain  from  hurting  "parties 
having  a  friendly  interest  in  the  prosperity"  of  his 
journal,  the  artist  in  Mark  Twain  had  fallen  into  a 
final  trance:  anybody  could  manipulate  him  now.  We 
have  seen  that  his  wife,  who  had  become  his  chief  cen- 
sor, having  no  more  independence  of  judgment  than  he, 
simply  exposed  him  to  the  control  of  public  opinion. 
This,  in  all  matters  of  culture,  meant  New  England,  and 
especially  Boston,  and  accordingly  to  please  Boston — 
impossible,  terrifying  task! — had  become  as  obligatory 
upon  Mark  Twain  as  to  please  Elmira. 

We  have  already  observed  the  intellectual  posture  of 
Boston  during  the  Gilded  Age.  Frigid  and  emascu- 
late, it  cast  upon  the  presuming  outsider  the  cold  and 
hostile  eye  of  an  elderly  maiden  aunt  who  is  not  prepared 
to  stand  any  nonsense. ' '  To-morrow  night, ' '  writes  Mark 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     119 

Twain,  in  one  of  Ms  earlier  letters,  "I  appear  for  the 
first  time  before  a  Boston  audience — 4,000  critics";  he 
was  lecturing  with  Petroleum  V.  Nasby,  and  he  tells 
how  frightened  Petroleum  was  before  the  ordeal.  For- 
tunately, in  a  sense,  for  Mark  Twain,  he  had,  in  Mr. 
Howells,  a  charitable  sponsor,  a  charitable  interme- 
diary; but  unfortunately  for  his  genius  Mr.  Howells 
was  no  more  independent  than  himself:  Mr.  Howells 
was  almost  as  much  the  nervous  and  timid  alien  in  Bos- 
ton society  as  Mrs.  Clemens,  and  as  the  latter's  natural 
ally  and  supreme  authority  in  the  task  of  shaping  her 
husband,  instead  of  dispelling  Mark  Twain's  fears  he 
simply  redoubled  them.  Together,  like  two  tremulous 
maids  dressing  the  plebeian  daughter  of  some  newly- 
rich  manufacturer  in  order  to  make  her  presentable  for 
a  court  ball,  they  worked  over  him,  expurgated  him, 
trimmed  him — to  his  own  everlasting  gratitude.  To 
Mr.  Howells  he  wrote :  "  I  owe  as  much  to  your  training 
as  the  rude  country  job-printer  owes  to  the  city-boss 
who  takes  him  in  hand  and  teaches  him  the  right  way 
to  handle  his  art";  and  of  his  wife  he  said:  "I  was  a 
mighty  rough,  coarse,  unpromising  subject  when  Livy 
took  charge  of  me  .  .  .  and  I  may  still  be  to  the  rest  of 
the  world,  but  not  to  her.  She  has  made  a  very  credit- 
able job  of  me."  And  no  doubt  that  refining  process 
was  necessary.  If  Mark  Twain  had  been  enabled  to 
stand  on  his  own  feet,  had  been  helped  to  discover  him- 
self as  an  artist,  it  would  have  resulted  naturally  from 
the  growth  of  his  own  self-consciousness,  his  own  criti- 
cal sense.  As  it  was,  undertaken  in  behalf  of  a  wholly 
false,  external  ideal  and  by  people  who  had  no  compre- 
hension of  his  true  principle  of  growth,  people  who  were 
themselves  subservient  to  public  opinion,  it  destroyed 
the  last  vestiges  of  his  moral  independence.  There  is 
a  sorry  tale  about  Mark  Twain's  neckties  that  is  really 
symbolic  of  the  process  he  was  going  through.  It  seems 
that  long  after  his  marriage  he  still  continued  to  wear 


120    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

an  old-fashioned  Western  string-tie  which  was  a  cause 
of  great  embarrassment  to  his  family  and  his  friends, 
an  ever-present  reminder  that  his  regeneration  was  still 
incomplete.  No  one  quite  knew  what  to  do  about  it  till 
at  last  Howells  and  Aldrich  boldly  bought  him  two 
cravats  and  humored  him,  to  his  wife's  infinite  comfort, 
into  wearing  them.  In  this  way  the  mysteries  of  a  pro- 
vincial gentility — provincial  because  it  was  without  a 
sense  of  proportion — were  kept  constantly  before  his 
mind  and  he,  the  lovable  victim  of  his  own  love,  a  Gulli- 
ver among  the  Lilliputians,  a  sleeping  Samson,  surren- 
dered his  limbs  to  the  myriad  threads  of  convention, 
yielded  his  locks  to  the  shears  of  that  simple  Delilah 
his  wife. 

For  what  sort  of  taste  was  it  that  Mark  Twain  had 
to  satisfy?  Hardly  a  taste  for  the  frank,  the  free,  the 
animated,  the  expressive!  The  criticism  he  received 
was  purely  negative.  "We  are  told  that  Mrs.  Clemens 
and  her  friends  read  Meredith  "with  reverential  appre- 
ciation, ' '  that  they  formed  a  circle  of  ' '  devout  listeners ' ' 
when  Mark  Twain  himself  used  to  read  Browning 
aloud  in  Hartford.  Profane  art,  the  mature  expres- 
sion of  life,  in  short,  was  outside  Mrs.  Clemens 's  circle 
of  ideas ;  she  could  not  breathe  in  that  atmosphere  with 
any  comfort ;  her  instinctive  notion  of  literature  was  of 
something  that  is  read  at  the  fireside,  out  loud,  under 
the  lamp,  a  family  institution,  vaguely  associated  with 
the  Bible  and  a  father  tempering  the  wind  of  King 
James's  English  to  the  sensitive  ears  and  blushing  cheek 
of  the  youngest  daughter.  Her  taste,  in  a  word,  was 
quite  infantile.  "Mrs.  Clemens  says  my  version  of  the 
blindfold  novelette,  'A  Murder  and  a  Marriage,'  is 
'good.'  Pretty  strong  language  for  her,"  writes  Mark 
Twain  in  1876;  and  we  know  that  when  he  was  at 
work  on  "Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "The  Prince  and 
the  Pauper,"  she  so  greatly  preferred  the  latter  that 
Mark  Twain  really  felt  it  was  rather  discreditable  of 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     121 

him  to  pay  any  attention  to  " Huckleberry  Finn"  at 
all.  "Imagine  this  fact,"  he  wrote  to  Ho  wells;  "I  have 
even  fascinated  Mrs.  Clemens  with  this  yarn  for  youth. 
My  stuff  generally  gets  considerable  damning  with  faint 
praise  out  of  her,  but  this  time  it  is  all  the  other  way. 
She  is  become  the  horse-leech's  daughter,  and  my  mill 
doesn't  grind  fast  enough  to  suit  her.  This  is  no  mean 
triumph,  my  dear  sir."  And  shortly  afterward  he 
wrote  to  his  mother:  "I  have  two  stories,  and  by  the 
verbal  agreement  they  are  both  going  into  the  same 
book;  but  Livy  says  they're  not,  and  by  George  I  she 
ought  to  know.  She  says  they're  going  into  separate 
books,  and  that  one  of  them  is  going  to  be  elegantly 
gotten  up,  even  if  the  elegance  of  it  eats  up  the  pub- 
lisher's profits  and  mine,  too."  It  was  "-The  Prince 
and  the  Pauper,"  a  book  that  anybody  might  have  writ- 
ten but  whose  romantic  medievalism  was  equally  re- 
spectable in  its  tendency  and  infantile  in  its  appeal, 
that  Mrs.  Clemens  felt  so  proud  of:  "nobody,"  adds 
Mr.  Paine,  "appears  to  have  been  especially  concerned 
about  Huck,  except,  possibly  the  publisher."  Plainly 
it  was  very  little  encouragement  that  Mark  Twain's 
natural  genius  received  from  these  relentless  critics 
to  whom  he  stood  in  such  subjection,  to  whom  he  offered 
such  devotion ;  for  Mr.  Howells,  too,  if  we  are  to  accept 
Mr.  Paine 's  record,  seconded  him  as  often  as  not  in 
these  innocuous,  infantile  ventures,  abetting  him  in  the 
production  of  "blindfold  novelettes"  and  plays  of  an 
abysmal  foolishness.  As  for  Mark  Twain's  unique  mas- 
terpiece, "Huckleberry  Finn,"  "I  like  it  only  tolerably 
well,  as  far  as  I  have  got,"  he  writes,  "and  may  pos- 
sibly pigeonhole  or  burn  the  MS.  when  it  is  done";  to 
which  Mr.  Paine  adds:  "It  did  not  fascinate  him  as 
did  the  story  of  the  wandering  prince.  He  persevered 
only  as  the  story  moved  him.  .  .  .  Apparently,  he  had 
not  yet  acquired  confidence  or  pride  enough  in  poor 
Huck  to  exhibit  him.  even  to  friends."  And  quite  nat- 


122     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

urally!  His  artistic  self-respect  had  been  so  little  de- 
veloped, had  been,  in  fact,  so  baffled  and  abashed  by  all 
this  mauling  and  fumbling  that  he  could  take  no  pride 
in  a  book  which  was,  precisely,  the  mirror  of  the  unre- 
generate  past  he  was  doing  his  best  to  live  down. 

Behold  Mrs.  Clemens,  then,  in  the  role  of  critic  and 
censor.  A  memorandum  Mark  Twain  made  at  the 
time  when  he  and  she  were  going  over  the  proofs  of 
" Following  the  Equator"  shows  us  how  she  conceived 
of  her  task.  It  is  in  the  form  of  a  dialogue  between 
them: 

Page  1,020,  9th  line  from  the  top.  I  think  some  other  word 
would  be  better  than  "stench."  You  have  used  that  pretty 
often. 

But  can't  I  get  it  in  anywhere?  You've  knocked  it  out  every 
time.  Out  it  goes  again.  And  yet  "stench"  is  a  noble,  good 
word. 

Page  1,038.  I  hate  to  have  your  father  pictured  as  lashing  a 
slave  boy. 

It's  out,  and  my  father  is  whitewashed. 

Page  1,050,  2nd  line  from  the  bottom.  Change  "breech-clout." 
It's  a  word  that  you  love  and  I  abominate.  I  would  take  that 
and  "offal"  out  of  the  language. 

You  are  steadily  weakening  the  English  tongue,  Livy. 

We  can  see  from  this  that  to  Mrs.  Clemens  virility  was 
just  as  offensive  as  profanity,  that  she  had  no  sense  of 
the  difference  between  virility  and  profanity  and  vul- 
garity, that  she  had,  in  short,  no  positive  taste,  no  in- 
dependence of  judgment  at  all.  We  can  see  also  that 
she  had  no  artistic  ideal  for  her  husband,  that  she  re- 
garded his  natural  liking  fcx  bold  and  masculine  lan- 
guage, which  was  one  of  the  outward  signs  of  his  latent 
greatness,  merely  as  a  literary  equivalent  of  bad  man- 
ners, as  something  that  endangered  their  common  pres- 
tige in  the  eyes  of  conventional  public  opinion.  She 
condemned  bis  writings,  says  Mr.  Paine,  specifically, 
"for  the  offense  they  might  give  in  one  way  or  an- 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     123 

other";  and  that  her  sole  object,  however  unconscious, 
in  doing  this  was  to  further  him,  not  as  an  artist  but 
as  a  popular  success,  and  especially  as  a  candidate  for 
gentility,  is  proved  by  the  fact  that  she  made  him,  as 
we  observe  in  the  incident  of  his  father  and  the  slave 
boy,  whitewash  not  only  himself  but  his  family  history 
also.  And  in  all  this  Mr.  Howells  seconded  her.  "It 
skirts  a  certain  kind  of  fun  which  you  can't  afford  to 
indulge  in,"  he  reminds  our  shorn  Samson  in  one  of  his 
letters;  and  again,  "I'd  have  that  swearing  out  in  an 
instant,"  the  "swearing"  in  this  case  being  what  he 
himself  admits  is  "so  exactly  the  thing  Huck  would 
say" — namely,  "they  comb  me  all  to  hell."  As  for 
Mark  Twain  himself,  he  took  it  as  meekly  as  a  lamb. 
Mr.  Paine  tells  of  a  certain  story  he  had  written  that 
was  disrespectful  to  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury. 
Forbidden  to  print  it,  he  had  "laboriously  translated  it 
into  German,  with  some  idea  of  publishing  it  surrep- 
titiously ;  but  his  conscience  had  been  too  much  for  him. 
He  had  confessed,  and  even  the  German  version  had 
been  suppressed."  And  how  does  he  accept  Mr. 
Howells 's  injunction  about  the  "swearing"  in  "Huckle- 
berry Finn"?  "Mrs.  Clemens  received  the  mail  this 
morning,"  he  writes,  "and  the  next  minute  she  lit  into 
the  study  with  danger  in  her  eye  and  this  demand  on 
her  tongue,  'Where  is  the  profanity  Mr.  Howells  speaks 
of?'  Then  I  had  to  miserably  confess  that  I  had  left 
it  out  when  reading  the  MS.  to  her.  Nothing  but  almost 
inspired  lying  got  me  out  of  this  scrape  with  my  scalp. 
Does  your  wife  give  you  rats,  like  that,  when  you  go  a 
little  one-sided?" 

They  are  very  humiliating,  these  glimpses  of  g^eat 
American  writers  behind'  the  scenes,  given  "rats"  by 
their  wives  whenever  they  stray  for  an  instant  from  the 
strait  and  narrow  path  that  leads  to  success.  "Once," 
writes  Mr.  Paine,  "when  Sarah  Orne  Jewett  was  with 
the  party — in  Rome — he  remarked  that  if  the  old  mas- 


124     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ters  had  labeled  their  fruit  one  wouldn't  be  so  likely 
to  mistake  pears  for  turnips.  'Youth,'  said  Mrs. 
Clemens,  gravely,  'if  you  do  not  care  for  these  master- 
pieces yourself,  you  might  at  least  consider  the  feel- 
ings of  others';  and  Miss  Jewett,  regarding  him  se- 
verely, added,  in  her  quaint  Yankee  fashion:  'Now 
you've  been  spoke  to!'  '  Very  humiliating,  very  igno- 
minious, I  say,  are  these  tableaux  of  "the  Lincoln  of 
our  literature"  in  the  posture  of  an  ignorant  little  boy 
browbeaten  by  the  dry  sisters  of  Culturei-Philistia. 
Very  humiliating,  and  also  very  tragic! 

Mark  Twain  had  come  East  with  the  only  conscious 
ambition  that  Western  life  had  bred  in  him,  the  ambi- 
tion to  succeed  in  a  practical  sense,  to  win  wealth  and 
fame.  But  the  poet  in  him  was  still  astir,  still  seek- 
ing, seeking,  seeking  for  corrob oration,  for  the  frank 
hand  and  the  gallant  word  that  might  set  it  free.  We 
know  this  from  the  dim  hope  of  liberation  he  had  asso- 
ciated with  the  idea  of  marriage,  and  we  can  guess  that 
his  eager  desire  to  meet  "men  of  superior  intellect  and 
character"  was  more  than  half  a  desire  to  find  some  one 
who  could  give  him  that  grand  conception  of  the  lit- 
erary life  which  he  had  never  been  able  to  formulate, 
some  one  who  could  show  him  how  to  meet  life  in  the 
proud,  free  way  of  the  artist,  how  to  unify  himself  and 
focus  his  powers.  Well,  he  had  met  the  best,  the  great- 
est, he  had  met  the  man  whom  the  Brahmins  them- 
selves had  crowned  as  their  successor,  he  had  met  Mr. 
Howells.  And  in  this  man  of  marvelous  talent,  this 
darling  of  all  the  gods  and  all  the  graces,  he  had  en- 
countered once  more  the  eternal,  universal,  instinctive^ 
American  subservience  to  what  Mr.  Santayana  calls  j 
"the  genteel  tradition."  He  had  reached,  in  short,  the 
heaven  of  literature  and  found  it  empty,  and  there  was 
nothing  beyond  for  the  poet  in  him  to  seek. 

Consider,  if  I  seem  to  be  exaggerating,  the  story  of 
"Captain  Stormfield's  Visit  to  Heaven,"  which  lay  in 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     125 

Mark  Twain's  safe  for  forty  years  before  he  dared  to 
publish  it.  That  little  tale  was  slight  enough  in  itself, 
but  he  was  always  tinkering  with  it:  as  the  years  went 
on  it  assumed  in  his  eyes  an  abnormal  importance  as  the 
symbol  of  what  he  wished  to  do  and  was  prohibited  from 
doing.  "The  other  evening,"  his  little  daughter  Susy 
records  in  1886,  "as  papa  and  I  were  promenading  up 
and  down  the  library,  he  told  me  that  he  didn't  expect 
to  write  but  one  more  book,  and  then  he  was  ready  to 
give  up  work  altogether,  die,  or  do  anything;  he  said 
that  he  had  written  more  than  he  had  ever  expected  to, 
and  the  only  book  that  he  had  been  particularly  anxious 
to  write  was  one  locked  up  in  the  safe  downstairs,  not 
yet  published.'*  He  had  begun  it  in  1868,  even  before 
he  had  issued  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  the  vast  popu- 
lar success  of  which  had  overlaid  this  tentative  personal 
venture  that  he  had  been  prevented,  because  of  its 
"blasphemous"  tendency,  from  pursuing.  There  was 
his  true  line,  the  line  of  satire — we  know  it  as  much, 
from  the  persistence  with  which  he  clung  to  that  -book 
as  from  his  own  statement  that  it  was  the  only  one  he 
had  been  particularly  anxious  to  write;  there  wis  his 
true  line,  and  he  had  halted  in  it  for  want  of  corrobora- 
tion.  And  what  was  Mr.  Howells's  counsel?  "When 
Howells  was  here  last,"  writes  Mark  Twain  to  his 
brother  Orion  in  1878,  "I  laid  before  him  the  whole 
story  without  referring  to  the  MS.  and  he  said:  'You 
have  got  it  sure  this  time.  But  drop  the  idea  of  making 
mere  magazine  stuff  of  it.  Don't  waste  it.  Print  it  by 
itself — publish  it  first  in  England — ask  Dean  Stanley  to 
endorse  it,  which  will  draw  some  of  the  teeth  of  the  re- 
ligious press,  and  then  reprint  in  America."  There  was 
the  highest  ideal,  the  boldest  conception,  of  personal 
freedom,  of  the  independence  of  the  spirit,  of  the  func- 
tion of  literature  that  Mark  Twain  had  found  in 
America.  "Neither  Howells  nor  I,"  he  adds,  "be- 
lieve in  hell  or  the  divinity  of  the  Savior,  but  no  mat- 


126    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ter."  No  matter,  no!  The  integrity  of  the  spirit  had 
become  as  indifferent  to  him  as  it  was  to  the  Gilded 
Age  itself.  He,  this  divided  soul,  had  sought  the  great 
leader  and  had  found  only  an  irresponsible  child  like 
himself,  a  child  who  told  him  that  you  had  to  sneak 
off  behind  the  barn  if  you  wanted  to  smoke  the  pipe 
of  truth. 

Is  it  remarkable,  then,  that  having  found  in  the  lit- 
erary life  as  it  shaped  itself  in  industrial  America  every 
incentive  to  cower  and  cringe  and  hedge,  and  no  incen- 
tive whatever  to  stand  upright  as  a  man — is  it  remark- 
able, I  say,  that  Mark  Twain  should  have  relapsed  into 
the  easy,  happy  posture  that  came  so  natural  to  him 
in  the  presence  of  his  wife,  the  posture  of  the  little  boy 
who  is  licensed  to  play  the  literary  game  as  much  aa 
he  likes  so  long  as  he  isn't  too  rude  or  too  vulgar  and 
turns  an  honest  penny  by  it  and  never  forgets  that  the 
real  business  of  life  is  to  make  hay  in  fame  and  fortune 
and  pass  muster,  in  course  of  time,  as  a  gentleman? 
"Smoke?"  he  writes.  "I  always  smoke  from  three  till 
five  on  Sunday  afternoons,  and  in  New  York,  the  other 
day,  I  smoked  a  week  day  and  night.  .  .  .  And  once  or 
twice  I  smouched  a  Sunday  when  the  boss  wasn't  look- 
ing. Nothing  is  half  so  good  as  literature  hooked  on 
Sunday,  on  the  sly."  Incorrigible  naughty  boy!  He 
never  dreams  of  asserting  a  will  of  his  own ;  but  doesn  't 
he  delight  in  his  freedom  from  responsibility,  isn't  it 
a  relief  to  be  absolved  from  the  effort  of  creating  stand- 
ards of  his  own  and  living  up  to  them  ? 

"A  man  is  never  anything  but  what  his  outside  influ- 
ences have  made  him,"  wrote  Mark  Twain,  years  later. 
"It  is  his  human  environment  which  influences  his 
mind  and  his  feelings,  furnishes  him  his  ideals,  and  sets 
him  on  his  road  and  keeps  him  in  it.  If  he  leave  that 
road  he  will  find  himself  shunned  by  the  people  whom 
he  most  loves  and  esteems,  and  whose  approval  he  most 
values."  He  who  so  willingly  suppressed,  at  his  wife's 


The  Candidate  for  Gentility     127 

command,  the  first  germ  of  the  book  he  was  to  call  his 
" Bible,"  a  deistical  note  on  God,  who  had  formed  the 
habit  of  withholding  views  which  he  thought  would 
strike  his  neighbors  as  "shocking,  heretical  and  blas- 
phemous," who,  in  spite  of  his  true  opinions,  spoke  of 
himself  in  public  to  the  end  of  his  life  as  a  Presby- 
terian, who  had,  in  fact,  like  the  chameleon  which  he 
said  man  was,  taken  the  religious  color  of  his  environ- 
ment, just  as  he  had  taken  its  social  and  financial  color 
— had  he  not  virtually  ceased  to  feel  any  obligation  to 
his  own  soul? 

"If,"  he  wrote,  in  "What  is  Man?",  "if  that  timid 
man  had  lived  all  his  life  in  a  community  of  human  rab- 
bits, had  never  read  of  brave  deeds,  had  never  heard 
speak  of  them,  had  never  heard  any  one  praise  them  nor 
express  envy  of  the  heroes  that  had  done  them,  he  would 
have  had  no  more  idea  of  bravery  than  Adam  had  of 
modesty,  and  it  could  never  by  any  possibility  have  oc- 
curred to  him  to  resolve  to  become  brave.  He  could  not 
originate  the  idea — it  had  to  come  to  him  from  the 
outside." 

The  tell-tale  emphasis  of  those  italics!  Is  not  that 
drab  philosophy  of  Mark  Twain's,  that  cumbrous  chain 
of  argument,  just  one  long  pathetic  plea  in  self- 
extenuation  ? 


CHAPTER  VI 

EVERYBODY'S  NEIGHBOR 

"Friends  are  an  expensive  luxury;  and  when  a  man's  whole 
capital  is  invested  in  a  calling  and  a  mission  in  life,  he  cannot 
afford  to  keep  them.  The  costliness  of  keeping  friends  does  not 
lie  in  what  one  does  for  them,  but  in  what  one,  out  of  consider- 
ation for  them,  refrains  from  doing.  This  means  the  crushing 
of  many  an  intellectual  germ." 

IBSEN:  Letter  to  Brandes,  1870. 

AND  now,  behold  the  burgeoning,  the  efflorescence  of 
the  Mark  Twain  that  all  America  knew !    Forgot- 
ten, deeply  buried,  is  the  "queer,  fanciful,  uncommuni- 
cative child"  of  earlier  days,  forgotten  is  the  grave  and 
passionate  young  poet  of  the  Mississippi,  the  pilot,  even 
the  miner  who  used  to  go  off  by  himself  and  brood 
among  those  vague  thoughts  of  his.     Forgotten  is  the 
young  poet  and  still  unborn  is  the  cynical  philosopher 
of  the  years  to  come.    Now,  and  for  at  least  one  glowing 
decade,  Mark  Twain  finds  himself,  as  he  says,  "thor- 
oughly and  uniformly  and  unceasingly  happy."     He 
has  not  faced  the  conflict  in  his  own  soul,  he  has  simply 
surrendered   and   repressed  his  leading   instinct,    and 
every  great  surrender  brings  with  it  a  sensation  of 
more  or  less  joyous  relief :  were  it  not  for  the  bitterness 
which  that  repression  is  destined  to  engender,  who  couldTl 
regret  indeed  that  he  has  found  in  quotidian  interests  I 
and  affections  and  appetites  so  complete  an  escape  from  \ 
the   labors   and  the  struggles   of  the   creative   spirit?  I 
Meanwhile,  as  his  individualiiy  sinks  back,  the  race-  ; 
character  emerges;  he  reverts  to  type,  and  everything 
characteristic  of  his  pioneer  heritage,  his  pioneer  en- 
vironment, comes  to  the  surface  in  him.     It  is  like  a 
128 


Everybody's  Neighbor  129 

sudden  flowering  in  his  nature  of  all  the  desires  of  those 
to  whom  his  own  desire  has,  from  the  outset  of  his  life, 
subjected  itself! 

Mr.  Herbert  Croly,  in  his  life  of  Mark  Hanna,  has 
described  that  worthy  as  the  typical  pioneer  business 
man.  "Personalities  and  associations,"  he  says,  "com- 
posed the  substance"  of  Mark  Hanna 's  life;  "his  dispo- 
sition was  active,  sympathetic,  and  expansive;  and  it 
was  both  uncritical  and  uncalculating.  He  accepted 
from  his  surroundings  the  prevailing  ideas  and  modes 
of  action";  he  had  "an  instinctive  disposition  towards 
an  expansive,  all-round  life."  Such  was  the  character 
of  "Boss  Hanna";  trait  by  trait,  it  had  now  become 
the  prevailing  character  of  Mark  Twain.  Had  he  not 
endeavored  to  make  himself  over  into  another  person, 
a  person  in  whom  his  family  might  take  pride  and 
pleasure?  He  had  striven  to  satisfy  their  standards,  to 
do  and  feel  and  think  and  admire  as  they  did  and  felt 
and  thought  and  admired;  and  at  last  the  metamor- 
phosis had,  to  all  appearances,  taken  place.  Mark 
Twain  had  become  primarily  the  husband,  the  father, 
and  the  business  man  with  responsibilities,  the  purpose 
of  whose  writing  was  to  please  his  friends,  make  money, 
and  entertain  his  own  household.  That  vast,  unem- 
ployed artistic  energy  of  his,  however,  which  had  not 
found  its  proper  channel,  overflowed  this  narrow  mold. 
Mark  Twain  was  like  a  stream  dammed  in  mid-career; 
and  so  powerful  was  that  unconscious  current  which 
had  been  checked  that  instead  of  turning  into  a  useful 
mill-pond  he  became  a  flood. 

"We  have  seen  that  his  home  had  always  been  the  hub 
of  Mark  Twain's  universe.  "Upset  and  disturbed"  as 
he  often  was,  says  Mr.  Paine,  "he  seldom  permitted  his 
distractions  to  interfere  with  the  program  of  his  fire- 
side." It  was  there,  indeed,  that  all  the  latent  poetry 
of  his  nature,  the  poetry  that  so  seldom  got  into  his 
books,  found  its  vent.  "To  us,"  he  wrote  once,  "our 


130    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

house  was  not  unsentient  matter — it  had  a  heart  and 
a  soul  and  eyes  to  see  us  with,  and  approvals  and  solici- 
tudes and  deep  sympathies ;  it  was  of  us,  and  we  were  in 
its  confidence,  and  lived  in  its  grace  and  in  the  peace  of 
its  benediction.  "We  never  came  home  from  an  absence 
that  its  face  did  not  light  up  and  speak  out  its  eloquent 
welcome — and  we  could  not  enter  it  unmoved."  It  is 
evident  from  this  how  much  of  the  energy  of  Mark 
Twain 's  imagination  had  passed  neither  into  his '  art 
nor,  exactly,  into  his  love,  but  rather  into  the  worship 
of  the  hearth  itself  as  the  symbol,  one  might  say,  of  his 
one  great  piety.  "From  the  very  beginning,"  says  Mr. 
fPaine,  "Mark  Twain's  home  meant  always  more  to  him 
than  his  work":  indeed,  in  the  name  of  his  domestic 
ties,  he  had  as  completely  surrendered  his  individuality 
as  any  monk  in  the  name  of  religion.  Naturally  his 
home  was  important  to  him ;  it  had  become  the  spring 
of  all  his  motives  and  all  his  desires.  And  having  ac- 
cepted the  role  of  the  opulent  householder,  he  threw 
into  it  as  much  energy  as  two  ordinary  men  are  able  to 
throw  into  their  life-work. 

Mark  Twain  had  accepted  his  father-in-law's  chal- 
lenge: he  was  not  going  to  fall  behind  the  pace  set  by 
a  coal-merchant  whose  household  expenses  were  $40,000 
a  year.  No  one  ever  delighted  more  than  he  now  in 
living  up  to  those  principles  of  "the  conspicuous  con- 
sumption of  goods,"  "predatory  emulation"  and  "the 
pecuniary  canons  of  taste"  which,  according  to  Mr. 
Veblen,  actuate  the  propertied  class.  "A  failure  to 
increase  one's  visible  consumption  when  the  means  for 
an  increase  are  at  hand  is  felt  in  popular  apprehen- 
sion," says  Mr.  Veblen,  "to  call  for  explanation,  and 
unworthy  motives  of  miserliness  are  imputed  to  those 
who  fall  short  in  this  respect. ' '  Of  course  Mark  Twain 
couldn't  stand  that!  As  early  as  1875  he  writes  to 
Mr.  Howells:  "You  see  I  take  a  vile,  mercenary  view 
of  things — but  then  my  household  expenses  are  some- 


Everybody's  Neighbor          131 

thing  almost  ghastly":  he  estimated  that  in  the  year 
1881  he  had  spent  considerably  more  than  $100,000. 
"It  was  with  the  increased  scale  of  living,"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "that  Clemens  had  become  especially  eager 
for  some  source  of  commercial  profit;  something  that 
would  yield  a  return,  not  in  paltry  thousands,  but  hun- 
dreds of  thousands.  Like  Colonel  Sellers,  he  must 
have  something  with  '  millions  in  it. '  '  This  was  the 
visible  sign  that  his  mode  of  living  had  now  become 
permanently  extravagant.  In  1906,  long  after  his  wife 
had  died  and  when  he  was  living  much  of  the  time 
virtually  alone,  his  household  expenses  amounted,  ac- 
cording to  Mr.  Paine,  "to  more  than  fifty  dollars  a  day. 
In  the  matter  of  food,  the  choicest  and  most  expensive 
the  market  could  furnish  was  always  served  in  lavish 
abundance.  He  had  the  best  and  highest-priced  ser- 
vants, ample  as  to  number."  Certainly  his  natural 
taste,  which  was  always,  we  are  told,  for  a  simple,  in- 
expensive style,  would  never  have  set  that  scale:  it 
was  a  habit  he  had  formed  in  those  early  efforts  to 
qualify  as  an  admired  citizen.  And  so  was  his  "dis- 
position towards  an  expansive,  all-round  life,"  a  dis- 
position that  finally  made  all  concentration  impossible 
to  him.  "In  his  large  hospitality,  and  in  a  certain 
boyish  love  of  grandeur,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "he  gloried 
in  the  splendor  of  his  entertainment,  the  admiration 
and  delight  of  his  guests.  There  were  always  guests; 
they  were  coming  and  going  constantly.  Clemens 
used  to  say  that  he  proposed  to  establish  a  'bus 
line  between  their  house  and  the  station  for  the  ac- 
commodation of  his  company.  .  .  .  For  the  better  portion 
of  the  year  he  was  willing  to  pay  the  price  of  it,  whether 
in  money  or  in  endurance" — after  a  while  he  virtually 
gave  up  all  thought  of  writing  except  during  the  sum- 
mer months:  "I  cannot  write  a  book  at  home,"  he 
frankly  told  his  mother — "and  Mrs.  Clemens  heroically 
did  her  part.  She  loved  these  things  also,  in  her  own 


132     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

way.  She  took  pride  in  them,  and  realized  that  they 
were  a  part  of  his  vast  success.  Yet  in  her  heart  she 
often  longed  for  the  simpler  life — above  all,  for  the 
farm  life  at  Elmira.  Her  spirit  cried  out  for  the  rest 
and  comfort  there."  Could  anything  be  more  ironical? 
It  was  to  satisfy  her  that  he  had  repressed  in  himself 
the  child  of  light  in  order  to  become  the  child  of  this 
world,  and  now  she  found  herself  actually  drowning  in 
the  flood  of  that  deflected  energy ! 

To  shine,  meanwhile,  to  make  money,  to  rival  and 
outrival  those  whom  the  public  most  admired  had  be- 
come Mark  Twain's  ruling  passion.  With  the  begin- 
ning of  his  life  in  Buffalo  he  was  already  "a  mtu.  .-. 
large  consequence  and  events,"  and  I  have  suggested 
that  in  the  process  of  adapting  himself  all  the  latent 
instincts  of  his  heritage  had  risen  up  in  him.  Take, 
for  instance,  that  mechanical  ingenuity  which  is  one  of 
the  outstanding  traits  of  the  pioneer  mind:  it  would 
certainly  have  remained  in  abeyance  if  Mark  Twain  had 
followed  his  natural  tendency  and  become  absorbed  in 
literature.  Now,  however,  with  his  ever-increasing  need 
of  money,  it  came  to  the  fore  and  was  by  way  of  turn- 
ing him  into  a  professional  inventor.  At  any  rate,  he 
invented,  among  other  things,  a  waistcoat  enabling  the 
wearer  to  dispense  with  suspenders,  a  shirt  requiring  no 
studs,  a  perpetual  calendar  watch-charm,  a  method  of 
casting  brass  dies  for  stamping  book-covers  and  wall- 
paper and  a  postal-check  to  supplant  the  money-order 
in  common  use — not  to  mention  the  "Mark  Twain 
Scrap-Book"  which  he  did  not  hesitate,  so  confused 
were  his  artistic  and  his  commercial  motives,  to  pro- 
mote under  his  own  name.  He  had,  moreover,  an  un- 
failing interest  in  the  mechanical  devices  of  other  peo- 
ple. When  he  installed  a  telharmonium  in  his  house  at 
Redding  he  made  a  little  speech  telling  his  friends  that 
he  had  been  the  first  author  in  the  world  to  use  a  type- 
writer for  manuscript  work — his  impression  was  that 


Everybody's  Neighbor  133 

"Tom  Sawyer"  was  the  first  book  to  be  copied  in  this 
way,  but  Mr.  Paine  thinks  it  was  "Life  on  the  Missis- 
sippi"— that  he  had  been  one  of  the  earliest  users  of  the 
fountain-pen,  and  that  his  had  been  the  first  telephone 
ever  used  in  a  private  house.  To  this  we  can  add  that 
he  was  one  of  the  first  to  use  the  phonograph  for  dic- 
tation and  one  of  the  first  purchasers  also  of  the  high- 
wheeled  bicycle.  We  can  see  one  reason  for  this  eager 
interest  in  mechanical  inventions  in  the  fact  that  out 
of  it  grew  many  of  those  adventures  in  financial  specu- 
lation to  which  also,  in  true  pioneer  fashion,  Mark 
Twain  was  drawn  like  steel  to  the  magnet.  He  in- 
vested, and  usually  lost,  large  sums  of  money  in  the 
following  patents:  a  steam  generator,  a  steam  pulley, 
a  new  method  of  marine  telegraphy,  a  new  engraving 
process,  a  new  cash-register,  a  spiral  hatpin.  His  losses 
in  almost  every  one  of  these  enterprises  amounted  to 
between  twenty-five  and  thirty  thousand  dollars,  and 
this  is  not  to  mention  the  Paige  Typesetting  Machine, 
which  cost  him  nearly  two  hundred  thousand  dollars  ' 
and  whole  years  out  of  his  life.  He  complained  of  the 
anxiety  these  ventures  caused  him,  of  the  frantic  efforts 
he  had  to  make  in  order  to  collect  the  money  to  invest 
in  them.  But  he  had  no  choice  now.  He  had  to  makej 
money  to  keep  the  mill  going  at  home  and  he  had  to 
make  money  in  order  to  make  money;  besides,  he  was 
the  victim  of  his  own  past,  of  the  gambling  habits  of 
the  gold-fields.  Within  one  month  after  the  happy 
conclusion  of  those  agonizing  years  of  struggle  to  re- 
dress his  bankruptcy,  he  was  negotiating  with  an  Aus- 
trian inventor  for  a  machine  that  was  to  be  used  to 
control  the  carpet-weaving  industries  of  the  world, 
planning  a  company  to  be  capitalized  at  fifteen  hundred 
million  dollars. 

Can  we  not  see  what  an  immense  creative  force  must 
have  been  displaced  in  order  to  give  passage  to  this 
"desire,"  as  Mr.  Paine  calls  it,  "to  heap  up  vast  and 


134    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

sudden  sums,  to  revel  in  torrential  golden  showers"? 
Mark  Twain  "boiled  over,"  we  are  told,  with  projects 
for  the  distribution  of  General  Grant's  book:  "his 
thoughts  were  far  too  busy  with  plans  for  furthering  the 
sale  of  the  great  military  memoir  to  follow  literary  ven- 
tures of  his  own. ' '  He  had  taken  over  the  book  because, 
as  "the  most  conspicuous  publisher  in  the  world" — for 
this  he  had,  in  fact,  become — he  had  an  immense  plant 
going,  yawning,  one  might  say,  for  the  biggest  available 
mouthful.  His  profit  from  this  particular  enterprise 
was  $150,000;  "Huckleberry  Finn"  brought  him,  at 
about  the  same  time,  $50,000  more :  "  I  am  frightened, ' ' 
he  wrote,  "at  the  proportions  of  my  prosperity.  It 
seems  to  me  that  whatever  I  touch  turns  to  gold."  His 
blood  was  up  now,  however;  he  was  insatiable;  how 
could  he  who,  as  a  miner,  had  known  what  it  was  to 
be  a  "millionaire  for  ten  days,"  and  who  had  become 
the  servant  of  no  conscious  creative  principle,  resist  the 
propulsion  of  a  demoralized  money -sense?  There,  at 
least,  that  balked  energy  of  his  might  express  itself 
freely,  gorgeously,  to  the  applause  of  all  America.  We 
see  him  planning  to  make  millions  from  a  certain  game 
of  English  kings;  proposing  a  grand  tour  of  authors — 
he  and  Howells,  Aldrich  and  Cable,  are  to  swing  about 
the  country  in  a  private  car,  with  himself  as  impresario 
and  paymaster,  "reaping  a  golden  harvest";  calculat- 
ing that  the  American  business  alone  of  the  Paige  Type- 
setting Machine  is  going  to  yield  thirty-five  millions  a 
year.  What  if  he  and  his  family  are,  almost  literally, 
killing  themselves  with  anxiety  over  that  infernal  in- 
vention, which  cost  them  three  thousand  dollars  a  month 
for  three  years  and  seven  months?  What  if  his  life  is 
broken  by  feverish  business  trips  across  the  ocean,  by 
swift  and  deadly  forays  against  the  publishing  pirates 
of  Canada?  What  if  he  is  in  a  state  of  chronic  agita- 
tion and  irritation,  "excited,  worried,  impatient,  rash, 
frenzied,  and  altogether  upset"?  He  is  living  against 


Everybody's  Neighbor  135 

the  grain;  no  matter,  he  is  living  the  true  American 
life,  living  it  with  a  mad  fervor.  He  cannot  even  pub- 
lish a  book  in  the  ordinary  way,  he  has  to  make  a  for- 
tune out  of  every  one :  ' '  a  book  in  the  trade, ' '  he  says, 
"is  a  book  thrown  away,  as  far  as  money-profit  goes. 
.  .  .  Any  other  means  of  bringing  out  a  book  [than  sub- 
scription] is  privately  printing  it."  He  "liked  the 
game  of  business,"  Mr.  Paine  says,  "especially  when  it 
was  pretentious  and  showily  prosperous."  Yes,  there 
Tom  Sawyer  might  swagger  to  his  heart's  content  and 
have  all  the  multitude,  and  the  enemies  of  his  own 
household,  with  him.  "Here  I  am,"  he  exclaims,  in 
the  vision  of  the  fortune  that  "poet  in  steel,"  Paige, 
is  going  to  bring  him — ' '  here  I  am  one  of  the  wealthiest 
grandees  in  America,  one  of  the  Vanderbilt  gang,  in 
fact."  Could  Elmira  have  asked  more  of  him  than 
that? 

For  Mark  Twain  was  not  simply  living  the  bourgeois 
life  now;  he  had  adopted  all  the  values  and  ideals  of 
the  bourgeoisie.  Success,  prestige,  position,  wealth  had 
become  his  gods  and  the  tribal  customs  of  a  nation  of 
traders  identical  in  his  mind  with  the  laws  of  the 
universe. 

He  was,  after  all,  a  literary  man ;  yet  as  a  publisher 
he  was  more  oblivious  to  the  advancement  of  literature 
than  the  ordinary  man  of  the  trade.  His  policy  was  the 
pursuit  of  "big"  names,  and  that  alone.  What  were 
the  works  issued  or  projected  under  his  direction  by 
the  firm  of  Charles  L.  Webster  and  Co.?  The  memoirs 
of  General  Grant,  General  Sheridan,  General  McClellan, 
General  Hancock  and  Henry  Ward  Beecher,  the  "Life 
of  Pope  Leo  XIII,"  and  a  book  by  the  King  of  the 
Sandwich  Islands.  It  was  not  even  greatness  outside 
of  literature  that  he  sought  for,  it  was  mere  notoriety: 
one  would  say  that  in  his  lifelong  passion  for  getting 
his  name  and  fame  associated  with  those  of  other  men 
who  were  secure  of  the  suffrages  of  the  multitude 


136    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Mark  Twain  was  almost  consciously  bidding  for  ap- 
proval and  corroboration.  He  had  that  slavish  weakness 
of  all  commercialized  men:  he  worshiped,  regardless 
of  his  own  shadowy  convictions,  any  one  who  was  able 
to  "put  it  over."  We  know  what  he  thought  of  Cecil 
Rhodes,  yet  "I  admire  him,"  he  said,  "I  frankly  con- 
fess it;  and  when  his  time  comes,  I  shall  buy  a  piece 
of  the  rope  for  a  keepsake."  As  for  Mrs.  Eddy,  he 
finds  her  "grasping,  sordid,  penurious,  famishing  for 
everything  she  sees— imoney,  power,  glory — vain,  un- 
truthful, jealous,  despotic,  arrogant,  insolent,  illiterate, 
shallow,  immeasurably  selfish"  ...  yet  still  ...  "in  sev- 
eral ways  the  most  interesting  woman  that  ever  lived, 
and  the  most  extraordinary.  It  is  quite  within  the 
probabilities,"  he  goes  on,  regarding  the  founder  of 
Christian  Science,  ' '  that  a  century  hence  she  will  be  the 
most  imposing  figure  that  has  cast  its  shadow  across  the 
globe  since  the  inauguration  of  our  era."  Why,  pray? 
Because  of  her  genius  for  organization,  because  of  her 
success  in  "putting  over"  what  he  freely  calls,  in  spite 
of  his  faith  in  its  methods,  the  greatest  hoax  in  history. 
And  why  did  he  admire  modern  Germany  and  despise 
modern  France  ?  The  Frenchman,  he  said,  is  ' '  the  most 
ridiculous  creature  in  the  world ' ' ;  his  ' '  only  race  preju- 
dice" was  against  the  French.  In  this,  and  in  his  blind 
worship  of  imperial  Germany,  he  reflected  the  view 
which  the  majority  of  American  business  men  have  con- 
veniently forgotten  of  late  years  that  they  ever  held. 
It  was  not  the  old  Germany  that  he  admired — never 
that!  It  was  Wilhelm's  Germany,  Bismarck's  Ger- 
many. He  who,  in  the  "Connecticut  Yankee,"  had  set 
out  to  make  mediaeval  England  a  "going  concern"  could 
hardly  do  other  than  adore  the  most  splendid  exam- 
ple of  just  that  phenomenon  in  all  history. 

Mark  Twain  had,  in  fact,  taken  on  the  whole  charac- 
ter and  point  of  view  of  the  American  magnate.  How 
enormously  preoccupied  his  later  European  letters  are, 


Everybody's  Neighbor          137 

for  instance,  with  hotels,  cabs,  couriers,  all  the  appur- 
tenances of  your  true  "Western  packing-house  prince  on 
tour!  We  are  told  that  once,  by  some  tragic  error, 
he  installed  himself  and  his  family  in  a  quarter  of  Ber- 
lin which  was  "eminently  not  the  place  for  a  distin- 
guished man  of  letters,"  and  that  he  hastened  to  move 
to  one  of  the  best  addresses  in  the  city,  of  which  "there 
was  no  need  to  be  ashamed."  He  had  become,  we  see, 
something  of  a  snob:  a  fact  illustrated  by  a  sorry 
episode  in  Mr.  Paine 's  biography  which  he  remembered 
with  a  feeling  of  guilt  and  mortification.  He  had  en- 
gaged a  poor  divinity  student  to  go  abroad  with  him 
and  his  family  as  an  amanuensis  and  he  told  how  that 
young  man  had  met  them,  in  his  bedraggled  raiment, 
on  the  deck  of  the  ship,  just  as  they  were  about  to  sail : 
"He  came  straight  to  us,  and  shook  hands  and  com- 
promised us.  Everybody  could  see  that  we  knew  him." 
What  supremely  mattered  to  Mark  Twain  now  was  the 
pomp  and  circumstance  of  his  own  prestige:  so  touchy 
had  he  become  that  we  find  him  employing  an  agent  in 
England  to  look  up  the  sources  of  a  purely  imaginary 
campaign  of  abuse  he  thought  a  certain  New  York  news- 
paper was  carrying  on  against  him.  He  wrote,  but  did 
not  mail,  "blasting"  letters  to  his  assailants  and  those 
who  crossed  or  criticized  him;  he  indulged  in  ferocious 
dreams  of  libel  suits,  this  man  who  had  staked  every- 
thing on  his  reputation !  Was  it  not  his  glory  that  he 
was  "beset  by  all  the  cranks  and  beggars  in  Christen- 
dom"? His  pride  was  not  in  his  work,  it  was  in  his"~\ 
power  and  his  fame. 

Thus  it  came  to  pass,  in  these  middle  years  of  his 
life,  that  while  in  the  old  world  virtually  every  writer 
of  eminence  was  inalterably  set  against  the  life-destroy- 
ing tendencies  of  capitalistic  industrialism,  Mark  Twain 
found  himself  the  spokesman  of  the  Philistine  majority, 
the  headlong  enthusiast  for  what  he  called  "the  plain- 
est and  sturdiest  and  infinitely  greatest  and  worthiest 


138     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

of  all  the  centuries  the  world  has  seen."  The  second 
half  of  "Life  on  the  Mississippi"  glows  with  compla- 
cent satisfaction  over  the  march  of  what  he  was  pleased 
to  accept  as  progress,  the  purely  quantitative  progress 
of  an  expanding  materialism ;  it  bristles  with  statistics, 
it  resembles,  in  fact,  nothing  so  much  as  the  annual 
commercial  supplement  of  a  Western  newspaper.  In 
1875,  when  he  was  on  one  of  his  many  pinnacles  of  pros- 
perity, he  wrote  a  Utopia,  "The  Curious  Republic  of 
Gondour."  And  what  was  the  sort  of  improvement  he 
showed  there  that  he  desired  for  the  world?  He  sug- 
gested that  "for  every  fifty  thousand  'sacos'  a  man 
added  to  his  property  he  was  entitled  to  another  vote." 
The  fable  was  published  anonymously:  the  great  demo- 
cratic humorist  could  hardly  father  in  public  the  views 
of  the  framers  of  the  American  Constitution.  But  we 
can  see  from  this  how  far  Mark  Twain,  like  the  chame- 
leon which  he  said  man  was,  had  taken  the  colors  of  the 
privileged  class  which  the  new  industrial  regime  had 
brought  forth  and  of  which  his  own  material  success 
had  made  him  a  member. 

His  essential  instinct,  as  we  know,  was  antagonistic 
to  all  this;  his  essential  instinct,  the  instinct  of  the 
artist,  placed  him  naturally  in  the  opposition  with  all 
the  great  European  writers  of  his  age.  Turn  to  his  let- 
ters and  see  what  he  says  in  the  privacy  of  his  corres- 
pondence and  memoranda.  He  is  strongly  against  the 
tariff;  he  vehemently  defends  the  principle  of  the  strike 
amT  woman  suffrage ;  he  is  consistently 'for  tfie~iinion  of 
labor  as  against  the  union  of  capital;  he  bitter lyHrejgrets 
the  formation  of  the  Trusts ;  "  a  ruling  public  and  politi- 
cal aristocracy  which "couTcL  create  a  presidential  succes- 
sion" is,  he  says,  neither  more  nor  less  than  monarchism. 
He  deals  one  blow  after  another  against  the  tendencies 
of  American  imperialism,  against  the  Balance  of  Power, 
against  the  Great  Power  system.  And  hear  what  he 
writes  in  1887:  "When  I  finished  Carlyle's  'French 


Everybody's  Neighbor          139 

Revolution'  in  1871,  I  was  a  Girondin;  every  time  I 
have  read  it  since  I  have  read  it  differently  .  .  .  and  now 
I  lay  the  book  down  once  more,  and  recognize  that  I 
am  a  Sansculotte! — and  not  a  pale,  characterless  Sans- 
culotte, TmflTllarat. "  All  this  in  the  privacy  of  his 
correspondence  f~Tn  public,  he  could  not  question,  he 
did  not  wish  to  question,  the  popular  drift  of  his  age, 
the  popular  cry  of  his  age,  "Nothing  succeeds  like  suc- 
cess"! Shall  I  be  told  that  he  created  quite  a  scandal 
in  Hartford  by  deserting  the  Republican  party  and  be- 
coming a  Mugwump?  At  least  he  was  in  very  respect- 
able company.  In  his  impetuous  defence  of  "the  drive 
and  push  and  rush  and  struggle  of  the  living,  tearing, 
booming,  nineteenth,  the  mightiest  of  all  the  centuries," 
he  was  incessantly  fighting  his  own  instincts:  we  find 
him,  in  one  situation  after  another,  defending  on  the 
most  factitious  grounds,  for  trumped  up  reasons  which 
he  had  to  give  his  conscience  but  which  he  would  have 
laughed  at  if  any  one  else  had  used  them,  vindicating, 
frantically  vindicating,  causes  which  he  loathed  in  his 
heart  but  which  he  was  constrained  to  consider  just. 
Is  it  the  Boer  war?  It  is  abhorrent  to  him,  and  yet 
he  insists  that  England's  hand  must  be  upheld.  He 
rages  in  secret  for  the  weaker;  in  public,  an  infallible 
monitor  keeps  him  on  the  winning  side.  All  that  year, 
we  note,  "Clemens  had  been  tossing  on  the  London 
social  tide";  he  had  to  mind  his  Ps  and  Qs  in  London 
drawing-rooms.  And  consider  his  remarks  on  the  an- 
nexation of  the  Sandwich  Islands.  "We  can  give  them, 
he  says,  "leather-headed  juries,  the  insanity  law,  and 
the  Tweed  ring.  .  .  .  "We  can  make  that  little  bunch  of 
sleepy  islands  the  hottest  corner  on  earth,  and  array 
it  in  the  moral  splendor  of  our  high  and  holy  civiliza- 
tion. .  .  .  'Shall  we,  to  men  benighted,  the  lamp  of  life 
deny'?"  Do  you  imagine  that  he  is  overtly  opposed 
to  the  annexation?  No,  we  have  Mr.  Paine 's  word  for 
it  that  this  was  Mark  Twain's  peculiar  fashion  of  urging 


140    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  step.  At  this  very  time  he  was  coining  money  out 
of  his  lectures  on  Hawaii :  he  could  hardly  have  afforded 
to  take  the  unpopular  view  that  found  expression  in  his 
letters.  In  Berlin  our  fanatical  anti-monarchist  com- 
presses his  angry  views  about  rebellion  against  kings 
into  a  few  secret  lines  hastily  written  in  his  hotel  bed- 
room: then,  having  been  cleverly  invited  to  dine  at  the 
Kaiser's  right  hand,  he  proceeds  to  tell  the  world  in  a 
loud  voice  how  incomparable  the  German  Empire  is. 
He  was  keeping  a  court  of  his  own,  in  Berlin,  in  Vienna, 
with  generals  and  ambassadors  dancing  attendance  on 
him! — how  could  he  have  spoken  out?  Yet  it  was  not 
hypocrisy,  this  perpetual  double-dealing,  though  we 
should  certainly  have  thought  it  so  if  psychology  had 
not  made  us  familiar  with  the  principle  of  the  "water- 
tight compartment":  Mark  Twain  was  the  chronic  vic- 
tim of  a  mode  of  life  that  placed  him  bodily  and  morally 
in  one  situation  after  another  where,  in  order  to  sur- 
vive, he  had  to  violate  the  law  of  his  own  spirit.  To 
him,  in  short,  all  success  was  a  fatality ;  and  just  in  the 
degree  that  his  repressed  self  raged  against  it,  his 
dominant  self  became  its  hierophant,  its  fugleman.  He" 
who  wrote  an  article  passionately  advocating  that  the 
salaries  of  American  ambassadors  should  be  quadrupled 
fand  that  an  official  costume  should  be  devised  for  them 
showed  how  utterly  he  failed  of  any  sense  of  the  true 
function  of  the  man  of  letters ;  he  had  become,  quite 
without  realizing  it,  the  mouthpiece  of  the  worldly  in- 
'fterests  of  a  primitive  commercial  society  with  no  ideal 
'save  that  of  material  prestige  and  aggrandizement. 

As  we  have  seen,  personal  and  private  loyalties  had 
come  to  take  precedence  in  Mark  Twain's  mind  over  all 
other  loyalties ;  no  ideal,  with  him,  no  purpose,  no  belief, 
was  to  be  weighed  for  a  moment  if  the  pursuit  of  it, 
or  the  promulgation  of  it,  was  likely  to  hurt  the  feel- 
ings of  a  friend.  Quite  early  in  his  career  he  planned 
a  book  on  England  and  collected  volumes  of  notes  for 


Everybody's  Neighbor          141 

it  only  to  give  over  the  scheme  because  he  was  afraid 
his  criticism  or  his  humor  would  ' '  offend  those  who  had 
taken  him  into  their  hearts  and  homes."  Imagine 
Emerson  having  been  prevented  by  any  such  considera- 
tion from  writing  ' '  English  Traits " !  I  have  pointed 
out  how  utterly  Mark  Twain  had  failed  to  rise  to  the 
conception  of  literature  as  a  great  impersonal  social  I 
instrument,  how  immersed  he  was  in  the  petty,  pro- 
vincial values  of  a  semi-rustic  bourgeoisie  among  whom 
the  slightest  expression  of  individuality  was  regarded 
as  an  attack  on  somebody's  feelings  or  somebody's 
pocket-book.  As  time  had  gone  on,  therefore,  and  his 
circle  of  friends  had  come  to  include  most  of  the  main 
pillars  of  American  society,  it  had  become  less  and  less 
possible  for  the  tongue-tied  artist  in  him  to  assert  itself 
against  the  complacent  pioneer.  We  know  what  his  in- 
stinctive religious  tendency  was;  yet  he  had  a  fatal 
way  of  entangling  his  loyalties  with  very  dogmatic 
ministers  of  the  gospel.  We  know  what  his  instinctive 
economic  and  political  tendencies  were;  yet  the  further 
he  advanced  in  his  business  activities,  and  the  more  he 
failed  in  them,  the  more  deeply  he  involved  himself 
with  all  the  old  freebooters  of  capitalism.  How,  then, 
could  he  have  developed  and  expressed  any  of  these 
tendencies  in  his  writings?  He  whose  "closest  personal 
friend  and  counselor  for  more  than  forty  years,"  as 
Mr.  Paine  says,  was  the  pastor  of  what  he  had  once, 
in  a  moment  of  illumination,  called  the  ' '  Church  of  the  , 
Holy  Speculators"  in  Hartford;  who,  from  the  depths 
of  his  gratitude,  was  to  say  of  H.  H.  Rogers,  when  the 
latter  rescued  him  in  his  bankruptcy,  "I  never  had  a 
friend  before  who  put  out  a  hand  and  tried  to  pull  me  • 
ashore  when  he  found  me  in  deep  water ' ' — this  man  had 
given  too  many  hostages  to  the  established  order  ever 
seriously  to  attack  that  order.  His  dominant  self  had 
no  desire  to  attack  it ;  his  dominant  self  was  part  and 
parcel  of  it.  Some  one  offered  him  as  a  publisher  a 


142     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

book  arraigning  the  Standard  Oil  Co.  "I  wanted  to 
say,"  he  wrote,  "the  only  man  I  care  for  in  the  world, 

the  only  man  I  would  give  a  d for,  the  only  man 

who  is  lavishing  his  sweat  and  blood  to  save  me  and 
mine  from  starvation  is  a  Standard  Oil  magnate.  If 
you  Jmow  me,  you  know  whether  I  want  the  book  or 
not."  His  obligations  had  gradually  come  to  be  in- 
numerable. We  find  him  urging  Mr.  Rogers  to  interest 
the  Rockefellers  "and  the  other  Standard  Oil  chiefs" 
in  Helen  Keller,  trying  to  inveigle  Carnegie  into  his 
moribund  publishing  business  as  a  partner,  accepting 
from  "Saint  Andrew's"  "Triumphant  Democracy"  the 
suggestion  for  his  own  ' '  Connecticut  Yankee ' '  and  from 
Saint  Andrew  himself  a  constant  supply  of  Scotch 
whiskey,  begging  his  "affectionate  old  friend  Uncle 
Joe"  Cannon  to  accomplish  for  him  a  certain  piece  of 
copyright  legislation.  How  was  Mark  Twain  to  set 
himself  up  as  a  heretic,  he  who  had  involved  himself 
over  head  and  ears  in  the  whole  complex  of  popular 
commercial  life,  he  who  was  himself  one  of  the  big 
fish  in  the  golden  torrent?  Only  once,  in  a  little  book 
published  after  his  death,  "Mark  Twain  and  the  Happy 
Island,"  does  one  find  his  buried  self  showing  its  claws. 
It  is  there  recorded  that  Mr.  Rockefeller,  Jr.,  having 
asked  him  to  speak  before  his  Sunday  School  class, 
Mark  Twain  suggested  as  his  topic  an  exposition  of 
Joseph's  Egyptian  policy.  The  invitation  was  not  re- 
peated. 

So  we  see  Mark  Twain,  this  playboy,  the  pioneer  in 
letters,  the  strayed  reveller,  the  leader  of  the  herd, 
giving  and  taking  with  a  hearty  liberality,  all  inside 
the  folk-feeling  of  his  time,  holding  the  American  nation 
in  the  hollow  of  his  hand — the  nation,  or  rather  the 
epoch,  whose  motto  he  had  coined  in  the  phrase,  "Tell 
the  truth  or  trump — but  get  the  trick."  Never  was  a 
writer  more  perfectly  at  home  with  his  public — he  does 
not  hesitate,  in  his  speeches  and  asides,  to  pour  out 


Everybody's  Neighbor  143 

the  most  intimate  details  of  his  domestic  life,  knowing 
as  he  does  that  all  America,  all  prosperous  America,  is 
just  one  good-humored  family  party.  When  he  fails 
in  business,  cheques  pour  in  upon  him  from  every  corner 
of  the  country :  "  It  was  known, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine,  ' '  that 
Mark  Twain  had  set  out  for  the  purpose  of  paying  his 
debts,  and  no  cause  would  make  a  deeper  appeal  to  his 
countrymen  than  that,  or,  for  that  matter,  to  the  world 
at  large."  At  Hartford,  we  are  told,  the  whole  neigh- 
borhood was  "like  one  great  family  with  a  community 
of  interests,  a  unity  of  ideals,"  and  gradually  that  cir- 
cle, "Holy  Speculators"  and  all,  had  widened  until 
Mark  Twain  had  become  everybody's  neighbor.  _^ 
Have  I  noted  enough  of  his  traits  to  show  that  in  his 
dominant  character  he  had  become  the  arch  typical  pio- 
neer? Let  me  note  them  once  more:  an  uncritical  and 
uncalculating  temper,  a  large,  loose  desire  for  an  ex- 
pansive and  expensive  all-round  life,  a  habit  of  accepting 
from  his  surroundings  "the  prevailing  ideas  and  modes 
of  action,"  a  naive  worship  of  success  and  prestige,  an 
eager  and  inveterate  interest  in  mechanical  inventions 
and  commercial  speculation,  an  instinctive  habit  of 
subjugating  all  loyalties  to  personal  and  domestic  loyal- 
ties. To  this  let  us  add,  finally,  the  versatile  career  of 
the  jack-of -all-trades.  "I  have  been  through  the  Cali- 
fornia mill,"  he  said,  "with  all  its  'dips,  spurs  and  an- 
gles, variations  and  sinuosities. '  I  have  worked  there  at 
all  the  different  trades  and  professions  known  to  the  cata- 
logues." And  once,  as  if  to  show  that  he  had  qualified 
for  the  popular  role  and  had  forestalled  what  Mr.  Croly 
calls  the  distrust  and  aversion  of  the  pioneer  democracy 
for  the  man  with  a  special  vocation  and  high  standards 
of  achievement,  he  drew  up  a  list  of  his  occupations  and 
found  that  he  had  been  a  printer,  a  pilot,  a  soldier,  a 
miner  in  several  kinds,  a  reporter,  a  lecturer  and  a  pub- 
lisher :  also  ' '  an  author  for  twenty  years  and  an  ass  for 
fifty-five." 


144     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

It  is  only  with  all  this  in  mind  that  we  can  grasp 
Mark  Twain's  instinctive  conception  of  the  literary 
career.  He  never  thought  of  literature  as  an  art,  as  the 
study  and  occupation  of  a  lifetime:  it  was  merely  the 
line  of  activity  which  he  followed  more  consistently 
than  any  other.  Primarily,  he  was  the  business  man, 
exploiting  his  imagination  for  commercial  profit,  his 
objects  being  precisely  those  of  any  other  business  man 
— to  provide  for  his  family,  to  gain  prestige,  to  make 
money  because  other  people  made  money  and  to  make 
more  money  than  other  people  made.  "We  remember 
how,  in  1868,  he  had  written  to  his  brother  Orion:  "I 
am  in  for  it  now.  I  must  go  on  chasing  [phantoms] 
until  I  marry,  then' I  am  done  with  literature  and  all 
other  bosh — that  is,  literature  wherewith  to  please  the 
general  public.  I  shall  write  to  please  myself  then." 
Similarly,  in  1899,  almost  at  the  other  end  of  the  span 
of  his  active  life,  he  wrote  to  Mr.  IJowells :  ' '  For  several 
years  I  have  been  intending  to  stop  writing  for  print 
as  soon  as  I  could  afford  it.  At  last  I  can  afford  it, 
and  have  put  the  pot-boiler  pen  away."  Those  two 
utterances  show  us  clearly  that  the  artist  in  him  was 
sufficiently  awake  at  the  beginning  and  at  the  end  of 
his  career  to  realize,  in  the  one  case,  that  he  was  not 
living  the  creative  life,  and  in  the  other  that  he  had  not 
lived  it — for  certainly  his  marriage  had  not  relieved  him 
from  the  necessity  of  pleasing  the  general  public !  Be- 
tween whiles,  the  creative  instinct  of  the  artist  had  been 
so  supplanted  by  the  acquisitive  instinct  of  the  pioneer 
that  he  had  no  conscious  sense  of  control  over  his  life 
at  all:  he  was  not  the  artist,  he  was  the  journalist,  the 
capitalist  equally  in  the  fields  of  business  enterprise  and 
of  letters. 

"If  Sam  had  got  that  pocket" — we  remember  the 
saying  of  his  old  California  comrade — "he  would  have 
remained  a  pocket-miner  to  the  end  of  his  days."  If, 
indeed,  literature  had  not  become  for  him  the  equiva- 


Everybody's  Neighbor          145 

lent  of  a  gold  mine,  the  only  gold  mine  available  on 
many  occasions,  would  he  have  continued  to  write  as 
he  did?  We  know  that  whenever,  as  sometimes  hap- 
pened, the  repressed  spirit  of  the  artist  in  him  raised 
its  head  and  perceived,  if  we  may  say  so,  the  full  extent 
of  its  debacle,  Mark  Twain  was  filled  with  a  despondent 
desire,  a  momentary  purpose  even,  to  stop  writing  alto- 
gether. ' '  Mama  and  I, ' '  wrote  his  little  daughter  Susy, 
"have  both  been  very  much  troubled  of  late  because 
papa,  since  he  had  been  publishing  General  Grant's 
books,  has  seemed  to  forget  his  own  books  and  works 
entirely;  and  the  other  evening,  as  papa  and  I  were 
promenading  up  and  down  the  library,  he  told  me  that 
he  didn't  expect  to  write  but  one  more  book,  and  then 
he  was  ready  to  give  up  work  altogether,  die,  or  do  any- 
thing." Certainly  he  wrould  never  have  so  neglected, 
abandoned,  his  own  writing  to  further  the  literary  for- 
tunes of  General  Grant,  a  task  that  almost  any  one 
might  have  done  quite  as  well,  if  in  his  own  writing 
he  had  been  experiencing  the  normal  flow  of  the  creative 
life:  he  had  thrown  himself  so  eagerly  into  the  pub- 
lishing business  precisely  because  his  creative  instinct 
had  been  thwarted.  We  have  just  seen  what  he  said  to 
Mr.  Howells:  "For  several  years  I  have  been  intending 
to  stop  writing  for  print  as  soon  as  I  could  afford  it": 
of  the  ' '  Connecticut  Yankee ' '  he  writes  elsewhere :  "  It 's 
my  swan-song,  my  retirement  from  literature  perma- 
nently." He  always  found  a  certain  pleasure  in  writing 
even  when  he  was  writing  at  his  worst,  and  yet  we 
can  see  that  the  artist  in  him  would  gladly  have  put 
a  stop  to  this  ironical  career,  if  it  had  not  had  another 
aspect,  a  more  practical  aspect,  that  appealed  to  his 
dominant  self.  ' '  From  the  very  beginning  Mark  Twain 's 
home  always  meant  more  to  him  than  his  work":  which 
is  simply  another  way  of  saying  that  that  gregarious 
pioneer,  that  comrade  and  emulator  of  politicians  and 
magnates  who  was  Mrs.  Clemens 's  husband,  found  ample 


146    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

reason  to  continue  his  literary  life  for  the  sake  of  the 
material  rewards  it  brought  him. 

How  completely,  in  a  word,  Mark  Twain  had  adopted 
the  prevailing  point  of  view  of  the  industrial  epoch! 
How  completely,  in  him,  during  those  middle  years,  the 
poet  was  submerged  in  the  pioneer !  Much  as  he  praised 
men  of  letters  like  Howells,  his  real  admiration  and 
respect  went  out  to  the  "strong,  silent  men"  of  money 
like  H.  H.  Rogers.  One  recalls  the  hesitation  with  which 
he,  "the  Lincoln  of  our  literature,"  as  Mr.  Howells 
calls  him,  presumed  to  offer  compliments  to  General 
Grant  on  the  literary  quality  of  his  Memoirs:  "I  was 
as  much  surprised  as  Columbus 's  cook  could  have  been 
to  learn  that  Columbus  wanted  his  opinion  as  to  how 
Columbus  was  doing  his  navigating."  There  is  decid- 
edly more  than  a  personal  humility  in  that,  there  is  all 
the  pioneer's  contempt  for  the  word  as  against  the  deed, 
an  ingrained  contempt  for  the  creative  life  as  against 
the  life  of  sagacious  action.  And  this  was  deeply  char- 
acteristic of  Mark  Twain.  He  was  always  for  the 
Bacons  as  opposed  to  the  Shakespeares ;  in  his  private 
memoranda  he  does  not  conceal  a  certain  disdain  for 
Jesus  Christ  in  comparison  with  Marcus  Aurelius  and 
the  Stoics,  and  the  indignant  passion  of  his  defense  of 
Harriet  Shelley,  to  mention  an  allied  instance,  is  hardly 
qualified  by  any  regard  for  her  husband.  Finally, 
writer  as  he  was,  his  enthusiasm  for  literature  was  as 
nothing  beside  his  enthusiasm  for  machinery:  he  had 
fully  accepted  the  illusion  of  his  contemporaries  that  the 
progress  of  machinery  was  identical  with  the  jprqgress 
of  humanity.  Hear  what  he  writes  to  his  brother  on 
one  of  the  several  occasions  when  the  Paige  Typesetting 
Machine  seemed  to  be  finished:  "Dear  Orion — At  12:20 
this  afternoon  a  line  of  movable  types  was  spaced  and 
justified  by  machinery,  for  the  first  time  in  the  history 
of  the  world:  and  I  was  there  to  see.  It  was  done 
automatically — instantly — perfectly.  This  is  indeed  the 


Everybody's  Neighbor          147 

first  line  of  movable  types  that  ever  was  perfectly 
spaced  and  perfectly  justified  on  this  earth.  All  the 
witnesses  made  written  record  of  the  immense  historical 
birth  .  .  .  and  also  set  down  the  hour  and  the  minute. 
Nobody  had  drank  anything,  and  yet  everybody  seemed 
drunk.  Well — dizzy,  stupefied,  stunned.  .  .  .  All  the 
other  wonderful  inventions  of  the  human  brain  sink 
pretty  nearly  into  commonplaces  contrasted  with  this 
awful  mechanical  miracle. "  It  is  one  ex-printer  writing 
to  another:  how  wonderful  that  machine  must  have 
seemed  to  a  man  whose  hands  remembered  the  grubby 
labor  of  the  old  village  type-case!  But  then,  Mark 
Twain  was  fifty-four  years  old  at  this  time  and  those 
memories  were  very  far  away,  too  far  away — as  even 
his  financial  interest  was  too  shallow,  after  all— to 
account  for  this  emotion,  before  one  of  the  innumerable 
mechanical  miracles  of  the  nineteenth  century,  of  re- 
spect, of  reverence,  of  awe-struck  wonder.  How  far,  we 
ask  ourselves,  how  far  had  not  Mark  Twain  become,  in 
order  to  experience  that  emotion  in  the  presence  of  a 
piece  of  machinery,  something  no  longer  himself  but 
the  embodiment  of  the  whole  industrial  epoch?  It  is 
enough  to  note  how  capable  he  was  of  the  elevations  of 
religion,  and  what  it  was  that  caused  those  elevations 
in  him.  It  was  not  literature.  Paige,  the  inventor  of 
this  machine,  he  called  "a  poet,  a  most  great  and 
genuine  poet,  whose  sublime  creations  are  written  in 
steel":  which  leaves  little  to  be  said  about  the  poets 
who  write  in  mere  words.  And,  in  fact,  on  the  occa- 
sion of  Walt  Whitman's  seventieth  birthday,  Mark 
Twain  expressed,  in  a  way,  his  opinion  of  such  people. 
He  congratulated  the  poet  for  having  lived  in  an  age 
that  had  witnessed,  among  other  benefactions,  "the 
amazing,  infinitely  varied  and  innumerable  products  of 
coal-tar";  he  neglected  to  congratulate  the  age  for  hav- 
ing produced  Walt  Whitman. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  PLAYBOY   IN  LETTERS 

"How  can  great  minds  be  produced  in  a  country  where  the 
test  of  a  great  mind  is  agreeing  in  the  opinions  of  small  minds  I ' ' 

JOHN  STUABT  MILL. 

WE  have  now  watched  tie  gradual  building  up  and 
the  final  flowering  in  Mark  Twain  of  the  person- 
ality which  his  mother,  his*  wife,  all  America  indeed, 
had,  so  to  speak,  wished  upon  him.  It  came  into  existence, 
xwe  recall,  that  personality, -through  his  mother's  ruth- 
less opposition  to  the  poet  in  him,  through  the  shock  of 
his  father's  death;  and  every  influence  he  had  encount- 
ered in  life  had  confirmed  him  in  the  pursuit  of  opulent 
respectability.  We  h^ve  seen,  however,  that  this  was"* 
not  the  real  Mark  Twain,  this  money-making,  success- 
loving,  wire-pulling  Philistine ;  it  was  a  sort  of  dis-  _ 
sociated  self,  the  race-character,  which  had  risen  in  him  / 
with  the  stoppage  of  his  true  individuality.  The  real 
Mark  Twain  had  been  arrested  in  his  development,  the 
artist  had  remained  rudimentary ;  and  this  is  the  Mark 
Twain  we  have  to  consider  now.  "What  a  child  he 
was,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "always,  to  the  very  end!"  It 
was  this  childishness  which  caused  and  which  explains 
his  lack  of  spiritual  independence  as  a  man  and  which 
accounts  for  the  character  of  his  work  as  a  writer. 

"What  a  child  he  was!"  Glance,  in  the  first  place, 
at  that  famous  temperament  of  his.  Perhaps  the  best 
impression  we  have  of  it  is  one  written  by  his  friend 
Joseph  Twitchell  in  a  letter  from  Switzerland  where 
they  were  tramping  together  in  1878.  Mark  Twain  was 
148 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         149 

forty-three  at  the  time.  "Mark  is  a  queer  fellow,'*  says 
Twitchell.  ' '  There  is  nothing  that  he  so  delights  in  as 
a  swift,  strong  stream.  You  can  hardly  get  him  to  leave 
one  when  once  he  is  within  the  influence  of  its  fasci- 
nations. To  throw  in  stones  and  sticks  seems  to  afford 
him  rapture.  To-night,  as  we  were  on  our  way  back  to 
the  hotel,  seeing  a  lot  of  driftwood  by  the*  torrent  side 
below  the  path,  I  climbed  down  and  threw  it  in.  When 
T  got  back  to  the  path  Mark  was  running  down-stream 
after  it  as  hard  as  he  could  go,  throwing  up  his  hands 
and  shouting  in  the  wildest  ecstacy,  and  when  a  piece 
went  over  a  fall  and  emerged  to  view  in  the  foam  below 
he  would  jump  up  and  down  and  yell.  He  said  after- 
ward that  he  hadn't  been  so  excited  in  three  months. 
He  acted  just  like  a  boy."  And  observe  what  he  said 
of  himself  in  "The  Turning-Pqint  of  My  Life":  "By 
temperament  I  was  the  kind  of  person  that  does  things. 
Does  them  and  reflects  afterward.  So  I  started  for  the 
Amazon  without  reflecting  and  without  asking  any  ques- 
tions. That  was  more  than  fifty  years  ago.  In  all  that 
time  my  temperament  has  not  changed,  by  even  a  shade. 
I  have  been  punished  many  and  many  a  time,  and  bit- 
terly, for  doing  things  and  reflecting  afterward,  but 
these  tortures  have  been  of  no  value  to  me :  I  still  do  the 
thing  commanded  by  Circumstance  and  Temperament, 
and  reflect  afterward."  One  could  hardly  ask  for  a 
more  perfect  definition  of  immaturity. 

Then  there  was  his  boyish  passion  for  make-believe, 
his  inclination  for  gorgeous  trappings  and  medieval 
splendor,  what  Mr.  Paine  calls  "the  fullness  of  his  love 
for  theatrical  effect."  We  know  how  he  enjoyed  dress- 
ing up  for  the  children's  charades,  how  he  revelled  in 
the  costumes  of  "The  Prince  and  the  Pauper."  His 
lifelong  delight  in  showing  off  had  the  same  origin. 
Mr.  Paine  tells  how  in  Washington  once,  when  they 
were  staying  at  the  Willard  Hotel,  supposing  that 
Clemens  would  like  to  go  down  to  dinner  with  as  little 


150     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ostentation  as  possible  he  took  him  by  an  elevator  that 
entered  the  dining-room  directly  and  without  stopping 
at  the  long  corridor  known  as  Peacock  Alley.  When 
they  reached  the  dining-room,  however,  Clemens  in- 
quired, "Isn't  there  another  entrance  to  this  place?" 
and  hearing  that  there  was,  a  very  conspicuous  one,  he 
added,  "Let's  go  back  and  try  it  over."  "So,"  says 
Mr.  Paine,  "we  went  back  up  the  elevator,  walked  to 
the  other  end  of  the  hotel,  and  came  down  to  the  F 
Street  entrance.  There  is  a  fine  stately  flight  of  steps — 
a  really  royal  stair — leading  from  this  entrance  down 
into  Peacock  Alley.  To  slowly  descend  that  flight  is  an 
impressive  thing  to  do.  It  is  like  descending  the  steps 
of  a  throne-room,  or  to  some  royal  landing-place  where 
Cleopatra's  barge  might  lie.  I  confess  that  I  was  some- 
what nervous  at  the  awfulness  of  the  occasion,  but  I 
reflected  that  I  was  powerfully  protected;  so  side  by 
side,  both  in  full-dress,  white  ties,  white  silk  waistcoats, 
and  all,  we  came  down  that  regal  flight.  Of  course  he 
was  seized  upon  at  once  by  a  lot  of  feminine  admirers, 
and  the  passage  along  the  corridor  was  a  perpetual 
gantlet.  I  realize  now  that  this  gave  the  dramatic 
finish  to  his  day,  and  furnished  him  with  proper  appe- 
tite for  his  dinner."  All  the  actors  in  the  world  may 
protest  that  they  would  do  the  same  thing:  the  motive 
is  none  the  less  for  that  an  adolescent  one.  When  Mark 
Twain  marvelled  at  the  court  costumes  of  the  Indian 
princes  at  Oxford,  when  he  said  he  had  been  particu- 
larly anxious  to  see  the  Oxford  pageant  in  order  to  get 
ideas  for  his  funeral  procession,  which  he  was  ' '  planning 
on  a  large  scale,"  when  he  remarked,  "If  I  had  been 
an  ancient  Briton,  I  would  not  have  contented  myself 
with  blue  paint,  but  I  would  have  bankrupted  the  raino 
bow,"  was  he  not,  at  sixty,  at  seventy,  just,  or  rather/ 
still,  Tom  Sawyer? 

Then  there  was  his  sense  of  proportion,  or  rather  his 
lack  of  any  sense  of  proportion,  his  rudimentary  judg- 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         151 

nient.  I  shall  say  nothing  here  of  his  truly  dazzling 
display  of  this  in  matters  of  business.  But  did  not 
Mark  Twain,  who  was  supposed  to  understand  his  own 
countrymen,  foretell  that  within  a  generation  after  his 
death  America  would  be  a  monarchy,  a  literal  monarchy, 
not  merely  a  citadel  of  economic  reaction?  Did  he  not 
affirm  with  all  conviction  that  the  Christian  Scientists 
would  so  increase  and  multiply  that  in  forty  years  they 
would  dominate  our  political  life?  There  are  certainly 
at  this  time  Western  cities  where  that  has  occurred,  but 
Mark  Twain,  the  hardy  prophet,  seems  never  to  have 
glimpsed  the  nascent  forces  into  whose  control  the 
political  and  economic  future  seems  really  bound  to 
pass.  In  all  the  years  of  his  traveling  to  and  fro 
through  Europe  he  divined  hardly  one  of  the  social 
tendencies  that  had  so  spectacular  a  Denouement  within 
four  years  of  his  death.  In  Austria,  where  he  spent  so 
much  time  at  the  turning  of  the  century,  he  was  dazzled 
by  the  pomp  of  the  assassinated  empress's  funeral — 
"this  murder,"  he  writes,  with  the  fatuity  of  a  school 
boy,  ''will  still  be  talked  of  and  described  and  painted 
a  thousand  years  from  now";  but  what  did  he  make  of 
that  memorable  clash  he  witnessed  in  the  Reichsrath 
between  the  Czech  and  the  German  deputies?  All  his- 
tory was  involved  in  that,  as  any  one  can  see  now,  as 
a  discerning  man  might  almost  have  seen  then.  In 
Mark  Twain's  "Stirring  Times  in  Austria"  it  is 
scarcely  anything  but  a  meaningless  brawl.  He  does 
not  make  comic  copy  of  it,  he  reports  it  with  all  gravity, 
but  he  understands  nothing  of  it — indeed  he  freely  says 
so.  It  was  this  same  childish  incuriosity  regarding  the 
nature  and  causes  of  the  human  drama,  this  same  rudi- 
mentary cultural  sense,  that  led  him  always  instinctively 
to  think  of  history,  for  instance,  just  as  boys  of  ten 
used  to  think  of  it,  as  a  succession  of  kings,  that  led  him 
into  tliat  reckless  use  of  superlatives  wherever  his  inter- 
est happened  to  be  engaged.  He  assured  Mr.  Paine  that 


152     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  news  of  somebody's  "discovery"  of  the  Baconian 
authorship  of  Shakespeare's  plays  would  reach  him  by 
cable  wherever  he  was,  that  "the  world  would  quake 
with  it";  and  he  said,  without  any  qualification  what- 
ever, that  the  premature  end  of  the  Russian-Japanese 
war  was  "entitled  to  rank  as  the  most  conspicuous  dis- 
aster in  political  history." 

And  quite  on  a  par  with  his  reckless  juvenility  of 
judgment  was  Mark  Twain's  level  of  reflection.  The 
jottings  from  his  note-books  that  Mr.  Paine  has  pub- 
lished consist  mainly  of  mere  childlike  observations  of 
sheer  fact  or  expressions  of  personal  animus.  His  re- 
marks on  social,  political  and  economic  subjects  are 
precisely  of  the*  sort  one  would  expect  from  what  is 
called  the  average  man:  "Communism  is  idiocy,"  for 
example.  "They  want  to  divide  up  the  property.  Sup- 
pose they  did  it.  It  requires  brains  to  keep  money  as 
well  as  to  make  it.  In  a  precious  little  while  the  money 
would  be  back  in  the  former  owner's  hands  and  the 
communist  would  be  poor  again.  The  division  would 
have  to  be  remade  every  three  years  or  it  would  do  the 
communist  no  good."  Is  that  the  sort  of  exploded 
platitude  one  looks  for  from  a  famous  man  of  letters? 
Imagine  a  French  or  an  English  writer  of  rank,  even 
of  the  most  conservative  color,  committing  to  paper  an 
opinion  so  utterly  unphilosophical !  One  would  say  that 
Mark  Twain  had  never  thought  at  all. 

And  then,  most  significant  of  all,  there  was  his  un- 
developed aesthetic  sense.  "Mark  Twain,"  says  his 
biographer,  "was  never  artistic,  in  the  common  accept- 
ance of  that  term;  neither  his  art  nor  his  tastes  were 
of  an  'artistic'  kind."  But  such  distinctions  lose  their 
meaning  an  inch  below  the  surface.  Every  one  is 
"artistic":  Mark  Twain,  like  the  majority  of  people, 
was  merely  rudimentarily  so.  His  humorous  acknow- 
ledgment of  this  fact  is,  of  course,  well  known;  all  the 
world  remembers  how  he  said  that  in  Bayreuth  he  felt 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         153 

like  "a  heretic  in  heaven":— "Well,"  he  adds,  in  "The 
Shrine  of  St.  Wagner, "  "  I  ought  to  have  recognized  the 
sign — the  old,  sure  sign  that  has  never  failed  me  in 
matters  of  art.  Whenever  I  enjoy  anything  in  art  it 
means  that  it  is  mighty  poor.  The  private  knowledge 
of  this  fact  has  saved  me  from  going  to  pieces  with 
enthusiasm  in  front  of  many  and  many  a  chromo." 
What  did  he  like?  In  painting,  Landseer — "and  the 
way  he  makes  animals  absolute  flesh  and  blood — inso- 
much that  if  the  room  were  darkened  ever  so  little  and 
a  motionless  living  animal  placed  beside  a  painted  one, 
no  man  could  tell  which  was  which."  In  music,  the 
Jubilee  Singers:  "Away  back  in  the  beginning — to 
my  mind — their  music  made  all  other  vocal  music 
cheap;  and  that  early  notion  is  emphasized  now.  .  .  . 
It  moves  me  infinitely  more  than  any  other  music  can. 
I  think  that  in  the  jubilees  and  their  songs  America  has 
produced  the  perfectest  flower  of  the  ages."  'In  poetry, 
Kipling — ' '  I  guess  he 's  just  about  my  level. ' '  In  earlier 
years,  we  are  told,  an  ancient  favorite  called  "The 
Burial  of  Moses"  became  for  him  "a  sort  of  literary 
touchstone,"  and  this  general  order  of  taste  remained 
his  to  the  end.  There  was  a  moment  when  he  read 
Browning,  a  rage  that  Mr.  Paine  finds  unaccountable, 
though  we  can  perhaps  attribute  it  to  the  fun  he  had  in 
puzzling  it  all  out;  he  Lad  a  lifelong  passion  for  Omar 
Khayyam,  but  that  was  half  a  matter  of  rhythm  and 
half  a  matter  of  doctrine;  he  had  a  sanguinary  en- 
counter with  Flaubert's  "Salammbo,^  which  he  didn't 
like,  "any  of  it":  otherwise  his  chosen  reading  was 
wholly  non-aesthetic.  He  "detested"  novels,  in  particu- 
lar: "I  never  could  stand  Meredith  and  most  of  the 
other  celebrities,"  he  said,  inclusively.  He  called  War- 
field's  "The  Music  Master"  as  "permanent"  as  Jeffer- 
son's "Rip  Van  Winkle,"  as,  for  that  matter,  it  was: 
indeed,  he  seems  to  have  taken  a  general  passive  pleasure 
in  all  the  popular  plays  and  stories  of  all  the  seasons. 


154     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

The  positive  note  in  his  taste,  then,  was  the  delight  in 
sonorous  sound,  with  haunting  suggestions  of  mossy 
marble  and  Thanatopsianism — in  short,  that  sense  of 
swinging  rhythm  which  is  the  most  primitive  form  of 
aesthetic  emotion,  combined  with  just  those  tints  of 
sentiment,  by  turns  mortuary  and  super-masculine, 
which  are  characteristic  of  an  Anglo-Saxon  adolescence. 

Now  all  these  traits  of  an  arrested  development  corre- 
spond with  the  mental  processes  we  find  at  work  in 
Mark  Twain's  literary  life.  In  his  lack  of  pride,  of 
sustained  interest,  in  his  work,  of  artistic  self-determina- 
tion and  self-control,  in  his  laziness  and  loose  extrava- 
gance one  finds  all  the  signs  of  the  impatient  novice 
who  becomes  gradually  the  unwilling  novice,  without 
ever  growing  up  to  the  art  of  letters  at  all.  Finally, 
as  we  shall  see,  the  books  he  wrote  with  love,  the  books 
in  which  he  really  expressed  himself  and  achieved  a 
measure  of  greatness,  were  books  of,  and  chiefly  for, 
children,  "books  in  which  his  own  juvenility  freely 
registered  itself. 

"Papa  has  done  a  great  deal  in  his  life  that  is  good 

and  very  remarkable,"  wrote  little  Susy  Clemens,  when 

'   she  was  fourteen  years  old,  "but  I  think  if  he  had  had 

\  the  advantages  with  which  he  could  have  developed  the 

gifts  which  he  has  made  no  use  of  in  writing  his  books 

...  he  could  have  done  more  than  he  has,  and  a  great 

deal  more,  even." 

I  should  like  to  point  out  that  there  is  more  discern- 
ment in  the  fragmentary  notes  of  this  little  girl  than 
in  anything  else  that  has  been  published  about  Mark 
Twain.  Susy  Clemens  was  a  born  psychologist ;  she  was 
always  troubled  about  her  father;  she  seems  indeed  to 
have  been  the  only  one  of  his  family,  his  associates,  to 
conjecture  in  her  dim,  childish  way  that  his  spirit  was 
at  odds  with  itself,  that  a  worm  perhaps,  for  she  could 
never  have  said  what  or  why,  lay  at  the  root  of  that 
abounding  temperament.  When  she  set  down  this  note 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         155 

her  father  was  in  the  full  glory  of  his  mid-career; 
wealth  and  fame  were  rolling  in  upon  him  and  tides  of 
praise  from  all  the  world.  He  was  on  a  pinnacle  of 
happiness,  indulging  to  the  full  that  reckless  prodigal- 
ity, spiritual  and  material,  in  which  he  found  his  chief 
delight.  Mr.  Howells,  Twitchell,  those  who  watched 
over  him,  fell,  like  so  many  children  themselves,  into 
that  mood  of  a  spendthrift  adolescence.  "Was  his  house 
always  full  of  carpenters  and  decorators,  adapting  it  to 
some  wider  scheme  of  splendid  living?  Was  there  no 
limit  to  that  lavish  hospitality?  "Was  his  life  constantly 
broken  by  business  activities,  by  trips  to  Canada,  by  the 
hundred  and  one  demands  that  are  laid  upon  an  ener- 
getic man  of  affairs  ?  Not  one  of  his  friends  seems  ever 
to  have  guessed  that  he  was  missing  his  destiny.  Some 
years  ago  Mr.  Howells  reprinted  the  long  series  of  his 
reviews  of  Mark  Twain's  books;  admirable  comments 
as  they  often  are  from  a  literary  point  of  view,  there 
is  not  the  slightest  indication  in  them  of  any  sense  of 
the  story  of  a  human  soul.  His  little  daughter  alone 
seems  to  have  divined  that  story,  and  she  was  troubled. 
Something  told  her  what  these  full-grown  men  of  letters 
and  religion  never  guessed,  that  this  extravagant  play- 
boy was  squandering  not  his  possessions  but  himself, 
scattering  to  the  winds  the  resources  nature  had  com- 
mitted to  him;  and  she  alone  knew  perhaps  that 
somehow,  sometime,  he  would  have  to  pay  for  it. 

Indeed,  for  it  is  not  yet  the  time  to  deal  with  conse- 
quences, was  there  ever  anything  like  the  loose  prodi- 
gality of  Mark  Twain's  mind?  "His  mental  Niagara," 
says  Mr.  Paine,  "was  always  pouring  away."  It  was, 
and  without  any  sort  of  discrimination,  any  sort  of 
control.  He  tossed  off  as  the  small  change  of  anecdote 
thousands  of  stories  any  dozen  of  which  would  have 
made  the  fortune  of  another  popular  writer :  stories  fell 
from  his  hand  like  cards  strewn  upon  the  ground.  "We 
have  seen  how  innumerable  were  the  side  activities  into 


156    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

which  he  poured  the  energy  he  was  unable  to  use  in  his 
writing.  In  his  writing  alone  his  energy  was  super- 
abundant to  such  a  degree  that  he  never  really  knew 
what  he  was  doing:  his  energy  was  the  master,  and  he 
was  merely  the  scribe. 

Unused,  half-used,  misused — was  ever  anything  like 
that  energy  ?  Mr.  Paine  tells  of  his  ' '  piling  up  hundreds 
of  manuscript  pages  only  because  his  brain  was  throng- 
ing as  with  a  myriad  of  fireflies,  a  swarm  of  darting, 
flashing  ideas  demanding  release."  He  was  always 
throwing  himself  away  upon  some  trifle,  stumbling  over 
himself,  as  it  were,  because  the  end  he  had  actually 
focussed  was  so  absurdly  inadequate  to  the  means  he 
couldn't  help  lavishing  upon  it.  There  was  "A  Double- 
Barrelled  Detective  Story, ' '  for  instance :  it  suggests  an 
elephant  trying  to  play  with  a  pea.  What  is  the  story, 
after  all,  but  a  sort  of  gigantic  burlesque  on  "  Sherlock 
Holmes"?  That  is  the  obscure  intention,  unless  I  am 
mistaken;  Mark  Twain  wants  to  show  you  how  simple 
it  is  to  turn  these  little  tricks  of  the  story-teller's  trade. 
And  what  is  the  final  result?  A  total  defeat.  "Sher- 
lock Holmes"  emerges  from  the  contest  as  securely  the 
victor  as  a  living  gnat  perched  upon  the  nose  of  a  dead 
lion.  And  then  there  were  those  vast  quantities  of  let- 
ters, twenty,  thirty,  forty  pages  long,  which  he  is  said 
to  have  written  to  Mr.  Ho  wells.  "I  am  writing  to 
you,"  he  remarks,  in  one  that  has  been  published,  "not 
because  I  have  anything  to  say,  but  because  you  don't 
have  to  answer  and  I  need  something  to  do  this  after- 
noon." Mark  Twain's  letters  are  not  good  letters  just 
because  of  this  lack  of  economy.  His  mind  does  not 
play  over  things  with  that  instinctive  check  and  balance 
that  makes  good  gossip :  it  merely  opens  the  sluice  and 
lets  nature  tumble  through,  in  all  its  meaningless 
abundance.  That  was  Mark  Twain's  way.  Think  of 
the  plans  he  conceived  and  never  carried  out,  even  the 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         157 

fraction  of  them  that  we  have  record  of,  the  "multitude 
of  discarded  manuscripts"  Mr.  Paine  mentions  now 
and  then :  three  bulky  manuscripts  about  Satan,  a  diary 
of  Shem  in  Noah's  ark,  "3000  Years  Among  the 
Microbes,"  a  burlesque  manual  of  etiquette,  a  story 
about  life  in  the  interior  of  an  iceberg,  "Hell -Fire 
Hotchkiss,"  "Huck  Finn  and  Tom  Sawyer  Among  the 
Indians,"  another  book  about  Huck  and  Tom  half 
written  in  1897,  a  third  book  begun  after  his  return  to 
Missouri  in  1902,  a  ghastly  tale  about  an  undertaker's 
love-affair  which  did  not  pass  the  family  censor — 
"somehow  he  could  never  tell  the  difference,"  the  story 
of  a  dubious  miraculous  conception  in  Arkansas,  "The 
Autobiography  of  a  Damn  Fool,"  "The  Mysterious 
Chamber,"  the  "1002nd  Arabian  Night,"  in  which 
Scheherezade  was  finally  to  talk  the  Sultan  to  death — 
how  many  others  were  there  ?  It  was  always  hit-or-miss 
with  Mark  Twain.  That  large,  loose,  ignorant  way  he 
had  of  talking  in  later  years,  so  meticulous  in  his  sta- 
tistics, so  exceedingly  fallible  in  his  social  intuitions — 
how  like  so  many  other  elderly  Americans  of  our  day 
who  have  lived  lives  of  authority! — was  it  not  charac- 
teristic of  his  whole  career?  That  vast  flow,  that  vast.^ 
fog  of  promiscuous  talk — was  it  garrulous,  was  it  not 
rather  phosphorescent,  swarming  with  glinting  frag- 
ments of  an  undeveloped  genius,  like  space  itself,  with 
all  the  stars  of  space,  following  some  dim  orbit  perhaps,  • 
but  beyond  the  certain  consciousness,  outside  the  feeblest  / 
control,  of  any  mortal  mind? 

An  undeveloped  genius,  an  undeveloped  artistic  fac- 
ulty— could  there  be  a  surer  sign  of  it  than  this  lack  of 
inner  control?  What  we  observe  in  all  this  prodigal 
and  chaotic  display  of  energy  is  the  natural  phenom- 
enon who  has  not  acquired  the  characteristics  of  the 
artist  at  all,  those  two  supreme  characteristics,  espe- 
cially, upon  which  Rodin  so  insisted  in  his  writings — 


158     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

patience  and  conscience,  characteristics  which  Puritan- 
ism has  monopolized  for  the  moral  life,  but  which  are 
of  the  essence  of  all  art. 

Patience,  conscience,  economy,  self-knowledge,  all 
those  humble  traits  of  the  wise  and  sober  workingman 
which  every  mature  artist  is — where  shall  we  look  for 
them  in  Mark  Twain's  record?  "I  don't  know  that  I 
can  write  a  play  that  will  play,"  he  says,  in  a  letter 
from  Vienna  in  1898;  "but  no  matter,  I'll  write  half  a 
dozen  that  won't,  anyway.  Dear  me,  I  didn't  know 
there  was  such  fun  in  it.  I'll  write  twenty  that  won't 
play."  This  fumbling,  frantic  child  of  sixty- three  has 
forgotten  that  years  before  he  had  been  convinced,  and 
with  every  reason,  that  write  a  play  he  could  not.  And 
hear  him  again:  "I  have  begun  twenty  magazine  arti- 
cles and  books — and  flung  every  one  of  them  aside  in 
turn."  Is  this  a  young  apprentice,  impatiently  trying 
out  the  different  aspects  of  a  talent  about  which  he  is 
still  in  the  dark?  No,  it  is  a  veteran  of  letters,  who 
has  been  writing  books  for  thirty  years  and  who,  far 
from  attempting  new  and  difficult  experiments  in  his 
craft,  lacks  nothing  but  the  perseverance  to  carry  out 
some  trivial  undertaking  on  an  old  and  well-tried  pat- 
tern. It  is  true  that  on  this  occasion  his  debts  had 
interfered  and  taken  the  spirit  out  of  his  work;  never- 
theless, those  months  in  Vienna  whose  tale  he  tells  were 
almost  typical  of  his  life.  He  appears  habitually  to 
have  had  five  or  six  books  going  at  once  which  he  found 
it  almost  impossible  to  finish ;  there  were  always  swarms 
of  beginnings,  but  his  impulse  seldom  carried  him 
through.  This  was  true  even  of  the  writing  of  those 
books  in  which,  as  one  might  suppose,  he  was  most 
happily  expressing  himself.  He  groaned  over  "Life  on 
the  Mississippi"  and  only  drove  himself  on  in  order  to 
fulfill  an  absurd  contract  that  Mark  Twain  the  writer 
had  made  with  Mark  Twain  the  publisher.  And,  strang- 
est of  all,  as  it  would  seem  if  we  did  not  know  how  little 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         159 

his  wife  approved  of  the  book,  there  was  "Huckleberry 
Finn."  This  man  who  had  experienced  a  " consuming 
interest  and  delight"  in  the  composition  of  a  play  which 
Mr.  Paine  calls  "a  dreary,  absurd,  impossible  perform- 
ance"— no  doubt  because  he  had  been  able  to  write  the 
whole  of  it,  three  hundred  pages,  in  forty-two  hours  by 
the  clock,  only  by  a  sort  of  chance,  it  appears,  finished 
his  one  masterpiece  at  all.  He  wrote  it  fitfully,  during 
a  period  of  eight  years,  his  interest  waxing  and  waning 
but  never  holding  out,  till  at  last  he  succeeded  in  push- 
ing it  into  the  home  stretch.  Indeed,  he  seems  to  have 
been  all  but  incapable  of  absorption.  The  most  engross- 
ing idea  he  ever  had  was  probably  that  of  the  "Con- 
necticut Yankee,"  a  book  at  least  more  ambitious  than 
any  other  he  attempted.  But  even  the  demoniac  pos- 
session of  that,  for  it  was  demoniac,  suffered  a  swift 
interruption.  Hardly  was  he  immersed  in  it  when  he 
rushed  out  again  in  a  sudden  sally.  It  was  in  defense 
of  General  Grant's  English  style,  and  the  red  rag  this 
time  was  the  grammatical  peccability  of  Matthew 
Arnold. 

In  all  this  capricious,  distracted,  uncertain,  spasmodic 
effort  we  observe  the  desperate  amateur,  driven  back 
again  and  again  by  a  sudden  desire,  by  necessity,  by  a 
hundred  impulsions  to  a  task  which  he  cannot  master, 
which  fascinates  him  and  yet,  to  speak  paradoxically, 
fails  to  interest  him.  Nothing  is  more  significant  than 
this  total  lack  of  sustained  interest  in  his  work — his  lack 
of  interest  in  literature  itself,  for  that  matter.  In  all 
his  books,  in  all  the  endless  pages  of  his  life  and  letters, 
there  is  scarcely  a  hint  of  any  concern  with  the  tech- 
nique, or  indeed  with  any  other  aspect,  of  what  was 
nothing  else,  surely,  than  his  art.  I  have  just  noted 
the  general  character  of  his  aesthetic  taste:  he  was  well 
satisfied  with  it,  he  was  undisturbed  by  aesthetic  curi- 
osity. He  said  he  "detested"  novels;  in  general,  he 
seems  to  have  read  none  but  those  of  Mr.  Howells,  his 


160     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

father  confessor  in  literature.  He  told  more  than  once 
how,  at  a  London  dinner-table,  Mrs.  Clemens  had  been 
"tortured"  to  have  to  admit  to  Stepniak  that  he  had 
never  read  Balzac,  Thackeray  "and  the  others";  he  said 
that  his  brother  had  tried  to  get  him  to  read  Dickens 
and  that,  although  he  was  ashamed,  he  could  not  do  it: 
he  had  read  only,  and  that  several  times,  "A  Tale  of 
Two  Cities,"  because,  we  may  assume,  its  theme  is  the 
French  Eevolution,  in  which  he  had  an  abiding  interest. 
An  animal  repugnance  to  Jane  Austen,  an  irritated 
schoolboy's  dislike  of  Scott  and  Cooper — is  not  that  the 
measure  of  the  literary  criticism  he  has  left  us?  But 
here  again  there  was  a  positive  note — his  lifelong  pre- 
occupation with  grammar.  How  many  essays  and 
speeches,  introductions  and  extravaganzas  by  Mark 
Twain  turn  upon  some  question  whose  interest  is  purely 
or  mainly  verbal! — "English  as  She  Is  Taught,"  "A 
Simplified  Alphabet,"  "The  Awful  German  Lan- 
guage," "A  Majestic  Literary  Fossil,"  "Fenimore 
Cooper's  Literary  Offenses,"  "Italian  with  Grammar," 
"William  Dean  Howells,"  "General  Grant  and  Mat- 
thew Arnold,"  "The  New  Guide  of  the  Conversation  in 
Portuguese  and  English."  It  is  the  letter-perfection  of 
Mr.  Howells  that  dazzles  him ;  the  want  of  it  he  considers 
a  sufficient  reason  for  saying  "you're  another"  to 
Matthew  Arnold  and  tripping  him  up  over  some  imag- 
inary verbal  gaucherie.  He  is  indignant  with  Cooper 
for  calling  women  "females":  indignation  was  Mark 
Twain's  habitual  attitude  toward  the  modes  of  the  past; 
and  foreign  languages  never  ceased  to  be  infinitely 
ludicrous  to  him  just  because  they  weren't  English. 
These  are  all  signs  of  the  young  schoolboy  who  has 
begun  to  take  a  pride  in  his  first  compositions  and  who 
has  become  suddenly  aware  of  words;  and  I  suggest 
that  Mark  Twain  never  reached  the  point  of  being  more 
at  home  in  the  language  of  ciAalization  than  that.  His 
preoccupation  with  letter-perfection  is  thrown  into  a 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         161 

significant  light  by  the  style  of  "Huckleberry  Finn." 
If  the  beauty  and  the  greatness  of  that  book  spring  from 
the  joyous  freedom  of  the  author,  is  it  not  because,  in 
throwing  off  the  bonds  of  the  bourgeois  society  whose 
mold  he  had  been  obliged  to  take,  he  was  reverting 
not  only  to  a  frame  of  mind  he  had  essentially  never 
outgrown,  but  to  a  native  idiom  as  well? 

Mark  Twain  has  told  us  again  and  again  that  in  all 
vital  matters  a  man  is  the  product  of  his  training.  If 
we  wanted  further  proof  that  his  taste  was  simply  rudi- 
mentary we  might  observe  that  it  developed  in  some 
slight  measure,  though  very  slightly  and  inconclusively, 
the  "training"  having  come  too  late.  Mr.  Paine  tells 
us,  for  example,  that  twelve  years  after  the  pilgrimage 
of  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  he  found  the  new,  bright 
copies  of  the  old  masters  no  longer  an  improvement  on 
the  originals,  although  he  still  did  not  care  for  the 
originals.  Indeed,  if  we  wish  to  understand  the  reason 
for  the  barbarous  contempt  he  displays,  obtrusively  in 
his  earlier  work,  for  the  historic  memorials  of  the 
human  spirit  in  Europe,  we  have  only  to  turn  to  the 
postscript  of  "The  Innocents  Abroad"  itself.  "We 
were  at  home  in  Palestine, ' '  says  Mark  Twain.  ' '  It  was 
easy  to  see  that  that  was  the  grand  feature  of  the  ex- 
pedition. We  had  cared  nothing  much  about  Europe. 
We  galloped  through  the  Louvre,  the  Pitti,  the  Uffizi, 
the  Vatican — all  the  galleries.  .  .  .  We  examined  mod- 
ern and  ancient  statuary  with  a  critical  eye  in  Florence, 
Rome,  or  anywhere  we  found  it,  and  praised  it  if  we  saw 
fit,  and  if  we  didn't  we  said  we  preferred  the  wooden 
Indians  in  front  of  the  cigar  stores  of  America.  But 
the  Holy  Land  brought  out  all  our  enthusiasm.  We 
fell  into  raptures  by  the  barren  shores  of  Galilee;  we 
pondered  at  Tabor  and  at  Nazareth.  .  .  .  Yes,  the  pil- 
grimage part  of  the  excursion  was  its  pet  feature — 
there  is  no  question  about  that."  Why?  Why  were 
Paris  and  Rome  nothing  to  Mark  Twain  but  the  material 


162    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

for  an  indifferent,  a  hostile  persiflage,  while  Jerusalem 
was  "full  of  poetry,  sublimity,  and,  more  than  all, 
dignity"?  It  was  because  the  only  education  he  had 
known  was  that  "Hebraic"  education  which  led  Mat- 
thew Arnold  to  say  that  the  American  people  of  his 
time  were  simply  the  English  middle  class  transplanted. 
"To  'fear  God  and  dread  the  Sunday  School,'  "  he 
wrote  to  Mr.  Howells  once,  "exactly  described  that  old 
feeling  which  I  used  to  have."  But  had  he  ever  out- 
grown this  fear  and  dread?  Had  not  his  wife  and  all 
those  other  narrow,  puritanical  influences  to  which  he 
had  subjected  himself  simply  taken  the  place  of  the 
Sunday  School  in  his  mind?  "Tom  Sawyer  Abroad," 
which  he  wrote  quite  late  in  life,  is  an  old-fashioned 
Western  country  "Sunday  School  scholar's"  romantic 
dream  of  the  "land  of  Egypt" — Tom  Sawyer's 
"abroad"  doesn't  include  Europe  at  all;  and  we  have 
seen  that  Mark  Twain's  general  attitude  as  a  European 
tourist  remained  always  that  of  the  uninitiated  Ameri- 
can business  man.  His  attention  had  been  fixed  in  his 
childhood  upon  the  civilization  of  the  Biblical  lands, 
and  that  is  why  they  seemed  to  him  so  full  of  poetry 
and  dignity;  his  attention  had  never  been  fixed  upon 
the  civilization  of  Europe,  and  that  is  why  it  seemed 
to  him  so  empty  and  absurd.  Faced  with  these  cultural 
phenomena,  he  reverted  all  his  life  to  the  attitude  which 
had  been  established  in  him  in  his  boyhood  and  had 
been  confirmed  by  all  the  forces  that  had  arrested  his 
development  beyond  that  stage. 

How,  then,  are  we  to  describe  Mark  Twain's  literary 
character?  Mr.  Paine  speaks  of  his  genius  as  "given 
rather  to  elaboration  than  to  construction";  he  says 
that ' '  most  of  his  characters  reflected  intimate  personali- 
ties of  his  early  life";  he  refers  to  "two  of  his  chief 
gifts — transcription  and  portrayal,"  adding  that  "he 
was  always  greater  at  these  things  than  at  invention." 
Are  not  these  traits,  which  are  indisputable,  the  traits 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         163 

of  a  mind  that  has  never  attained  to  creation  in  the 
proper  sense,  a  mind  that  has  stopped  short  of  the 
actual  process  of  art?  As  we  run  over  the  list  of  his 
books  we  see  that  the  majority  of  them,  including 
virtually  all  his  good  work,  were  not  even  creative  in 
design  but  rather  reminiscent,  descriptive,  autobio- 
graphical or  historical:  "The  Innocents  Abroad," 
"Koughing  It,"  "A  Tramp  Abroad,"  "Following  the 
Equator,"  "Joan  of  Arc,"  "Huckleberry  Finn,"  "Tom, 
Sawyer,"  "Life  on  the  Mississippi."  It  was  as  a  pilot 
on  the  river,  he  said,  that  he  had  learned  to  know 
human  nature  and  the  world.  But  had  he  assimilated 
what  he  learned  ?  "When,  in  later  days,  he  turned  back 
upon  his  life  for  literary  material,  it  was  not  this  great 
period  that  rose  in  his  mind,  save  for  the  merely  descrip- 
tive work  of  "Life  on  the  Mississippi" — and  even  there 
it  is  the  river  itself  and  not  its  human  nature  that 
comes  most  insistently  before  us;  it  was  his  boyhood 
in  Hannibal.  Mark  Twain  remembered,  indeed,  the 
marvelous  gallery  of  American  types  the  Mississippi 
had  spread  before  him,  but  it  had  never  become  his  for 
art:  his  imagination  had  never  attained  the  mastery 
over  that  variegated  world  of  men.  That  his  spirit 
had,  in  fact,  been  closed  to  experience  is  indicated  in 
Mr.  Paine 's  statement  that  "most  of  his  characters 
reflected  intimate  personalities  of  his  early  life  " ;  he  has 
sketched  a  few  portraits  in  outline,  a  few  caricatures, 
but  the  only  characters  he  is  able  to  conceive  realisti- 
cally are  boys.  In  "The  Gilded  Age"  alone,  in  the 
sole  character  of  Laura  Hawkins,  one  can  fairly  say, 
he  handles  the  material  of  real  life  with  the  novelist's 
intention,  and  what  a  character,  what  a  love-story,  hers 
is!  "It  is  a  long  story:  unfortunately,  it  is  an  old 
story,  and  it  need  not  be  dwelt  upon,"  he  says  of 
Laura's  seduction,  with  a  prudent  eye  for  the  refined 
sensibilities  of  those  ladies  of  Hartford  under  whose 
surveillance  the  book  was  written.  It  was  a  fortunate 


164    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

thing  that  Mark  Twain  did  not  attempt  to  dwell  upon 
it:  he  would  have  had  his  task  showing  in  detail  how 
the  fair  and  virginal  Laura  became  the  "consummate 
artist  in  passion"  he  says  she  did!  He  turns  Laura 
into  a  Jezebel  because,  it  is  perfectly  plain,  the  moral 
prepossessions  of  Hartford  having  been  transgressed  in 
her  person,  it  was  the  popular  melodramatic  thing  to 
do.  He  was  both  afraid  and  unable  to  present  her  char- 
acter truly,  and,  in  consequence,  too  impatient,  too 
indifferent,  too  little  interested,  even  to  attempt  it.  We 
have  here  the  conclusive,  the  typical,  illustration  of  his_, 
failure  as  a  creative  artist.  His  original  submission  to  j 
the  taboos  of  his  environment  had  prevented  him  from  ' 
assimilating  life:  consequently,  he  was  prevented  as 
much  by  his  own  immaturity  as  by  fear  of  public 
opinion  from  ever  attempting  seriously  to  recreate  it 
in  his  imagination. 

We  can  best  describe  Mark  Twain,  therefore,  as  an 
improvisator,  a  spirit  with  none  of  the  inner  control, 
none  of  the  self-determination  of  the  artist,  who  com- 
posed extempore,  as  it  were,  and  at  the  solicitation  of 
influences  external  to  himself.  It  is  remarkable  how 
many  of  his  ideas  are  developments  of  "news  items" 
floating  about  in  his  journalist's  imagination,  items  like 
the  Siamese  Twins  and  the  Tichborne  case.  Except  for 
the  ever-recurring  themes  of  Huck  and  Tom,  one  would 
say  that  his  own  spirit  never  prompted  his  imagination 
at  all;  certainly  his  own  spirit  never  controlled  it.  His 
books  are  without  form  and  without  development ;  they 
tell  themselves,  their  author  never  holds  the  reins — a 
fact  he  naively  confesses  in  the  preface  of  "Those  Ex- 
traordinary Twins":  "Before  the  book  was  half  finished 
those  three  were  taking  things  almost  entirely  into  their 
own  hands  and  working  the  whole  tale  as  a  private 
venture  of  their  own."  Moreover,  he  depended  upon 
outside  stimulus,  not  to  quicken  his  mental  machinery 
merely,  but  actually  to  set  it  going.  When,  in  later 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         165 

life,  he  wrote  that  man  is  "moved,  directed,  commanded 
by  exterior  influences  solely,"  he  was  simply  describing 
his  personal  experience.  , 

Glance  at  his  record  once  more.  What  led  him  to 
undertake  the  voyage  that  resulted  in  "The  Innocents 
Abroad"?  Chiefly  the  advice  of  Anson  Burlingame. 
After  publishing  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  we  are  told, 
"he  had  begun  early  in  the  year  to  talk  about  another 
book,  but  nothing  had  come  of  it  beyond  a  project  or 
two,  more  or  less  hazy  and  unpursued."  It  was  only 
when  his  publisher  came  forward  and  suggested  that  he 
should  write  a  book  about  his  travels  and  experiences 
in  the  Far  West  that  he  set  to  work  at  the  composition 
of  "Roughing  It."  The  presence  and  stimulus  of  his 
friend  Twitchell  enabled  him  to  write  "A  Tramp 
Abroad":  we  know  this  from  the  fact  that  he  undertook 
a  subsequent  journey  down  the  Rhone  with  the  express 
purpose  of  writing  another  book  which,  because,  as  he 
repeatedly  said,  Twitchell  was  not  with  him,  resulted 
in  nothing  but  "a  State  of  coma"  and  a  thousand 
chaotic  notes  he  never  used.  In  1874  we  find  him  again 
waiting  for  the  impulse  that  seems  hardly  ever  to  have 
come  from  within:  his  wife  and  Howells  urge  him  to 
write  for  the  Atlantic  and  it  is  only  then  that  fresh 
memories  rise  in  his  mind  and  he  begins  "Life  on  the 
Mississippi."  In  1878,  the  demand  for  a  new  Mark 
Twain  book  of  travel  was  "an  added  reason  for  going 
to  Europe  again."  The  chief  motive  that  roused  him 
to  the  composition  of  "A  Connecticut  Yankee"  seems 
to  have  been  to  provide  an  adequate  mouthful  for  the 
yawning  jaws  of  his  own  publishing  business.  And 
even  "Huckleberry  Finn,"  if  we  are  to  believe  Mr. 
Paine,  was  not  spontaneously  born:  "He  had  received 
from  somewhere  new  afflatus  for  the  story  of  Huck  and 
Tom,  and  was  working  on  it  steadily."  This  absence 
in  him  of  the  proud,  instinctive  autonomy  of  the  artist 
is  illustrated  in  another  trait  also.  How  overjoyed  he 


166    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

was  when  he  could  get  Mr.  Howells  to  read  his  proofs 
for  him,  the  proofs  even  of  the  books  he  had  written 
for  love !  And  hov  willing  he  was  to  have  those  proofs 
mauled  and  slashed!  "His  proof-sheets  came  back  to 
The  Atlantic,"  says  Mr.  Howells,  "each  a  veritable 
'mush  of  concession,'  as  Emerson  says":  and  before  he 
had  finished  "Life  on  the  Mississippi"  he  set  his  pub- 
lisher to  work  editing  it,  with  the  consequence,  he  writes, 
that  "large  areas  of  it  are  condemned  here  and  there 
and  yonder." 

Here,  I  think,  we  approach  the  secret  of  Mark 
Twain's  notorious  "laziness."  Mr.  Paine  assures  us 
that  he  was  not  lazy  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word : 
"that  he  detested  manual  labor  is  true  enough,  but  at 
the  work  for  which  he  was  fitted  and  intended  it  may 
be  set  down  here  on  authority  (and  despite  his  own 
frequent  assertions  to  the  contrary)  that  to  his  last 
year  he  was  the  most  industrious  of  men."  Very  well, 
but  what  are  we  to  say  of  that  "languor"  of  his,  that 
love  of  "the  loose  luxury  of  undress  and  the  comfort 
of  pillows"  which  grew  upon  him,  especially  in  later 
years,  when  he  received  his  company  propped  up  in 
bed  in  that  gorgeous  Persian  dressing-gown,  that  "state 
of  coma  and  lazy  comfort  and  solid  happiness"  into 
which  he  was  always  drifting,  that  indolence  which, 
aside  from  his  incessant  billiard-playing,  led  him  to 
spend  "most"  of  a  summer  in  mid-life  playing  ten-pins? 
Much  of  it,  no  doubt,  was  a  pose:  it  was  a  way  of 
protesting  to  the  public  and  his  matter-of-fact  friends 
that  if  he  was  engaged  in  a  pursuit  as  altogether  useless 
as  that  of  literature,  at  least  he  wasn't  taking  it  too 
seriously.  That  accounts  for  what  Mr.  Paine  calls  his 
"frequent  assertions  to  the  contrary."  But  part  of 
this  lax  mood  was  involuntary,  and  is  not  to  be  attrib- 
uted to  his  Southern  temperament ;  it  was  the  sign  that 
he  was  essentially  unemployed,  it  was  the  flapping  as 
it  were  of  those  great  sails  the  wind  had  never  filled. 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         167 

There  he  was,  a  man,  with  all  the  powers  and  energies 
of  a  man,  living  the  irresponsible  life  of  a  boy;  there 
he  was,  an  artist,  a  potential  artis^  living  the  life  of 
a  journalist;  everything  he  did  was  a  hundred  times 
too  easy  for  him;  the  goal  he  had  set  himself,  the  goal 
that  had  been  set  for  him,  was  so  low  that  it  not  only 
failed  to  enlist  his  real  forces  but  actually  obliged  him 
to  live  slackly.  He  was  thus  a  sort  of  individual  analogy 
to  the  capitalist  regime  which,  as  Mr.  Veblen  describes 
it,  is  capable  of  reaping  its  profits  only  by  maintaining 
throughout  the  industrial  system  in  general  a  certain 
"incapacity  by  advisement."  And  in  order  to  spare 
himself  in  his  own  eyes  he  convinced  himself  that  this 
laziness  was  predestined.  Mr.  Paine 's  biography  opens 
with  these  words:  "On  page  492  of  the  old  volume  of 
Seutonius,  which  Mark  Twain  read  until  his  very  last 
day,  there  is  a  reference  to  one  Flavius  Clemens,  a  man 
of  wide  repute  'for  his  want  of  energy,'  and  in  a 
marginal  note  he  has  written :  '  I  guess  this  is  where  our 
line  starts.'  '  If  people  are  lazy,  one  imagines  him 
saying  to  himself,  it  may  sometimes  be  their  own  fault. 
But  who  can  blame  the  man  who  is  "born  lazy,"  the 
man  who  is  descended  from  a  lazy  line? 

It  is  only  as  a  result  of  the  stoppage  of  his  creative 
life  that  we  can  explain  also  the  endless  distractions  to 
which  his  literary  career  was  subject.  "I  came  here," 
he  writes  from  London  as  early  as  1872,  "to  take  notes 
for  a  book,  but  I  haven't  done  much  but  attend  dinners 
and  make  speeches. ' '  That  innocent  reclame  of  his,  that 
irresistible  passion  for  the  limelight  which  was  forever 
drawing  off  the  forces  that  ought  to  have  been  invested 
in  his  work,  was  due  largely,  no  doubt,  to  his  inordinate 
desire  for  approval,  for  self-corroboration.  But  if  his 
heart  had  been  in  his  work  would  he  have  courted  so 
many  interruptions  ?  For  court  them  he  did :  he  invited, 
he  brought  upon  himself  a  mode  of  living  that  made 
work  almost  impossible.  "I  don't  really  get  anything 


168    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

done  worth  speaking  of,"  he  writes  in  1881,  "except 
during  the  three  or  four  months  that  we  are  away  in 
the  summer.  ...  I  keep  three  or  four  books  on  the 
stocks  all  the  time,  but  I  seldom  add  a  satisfactory 
chapter  to  one  of  them. ' '  Was  Mrs.  Clemens  to  blame  ? 
We  are  distinctly  told  that  she  was  dazed,  that  she  was 
appalled,  at  the  extravagant  manner  of  living  into 
which  the  household  had  drifted.  Mark  Twain's  vast 
energy  had  flowed  into  this  channel  of  the  opulent 
householder  because  it  had  not  been  able  to  find  free 
expression  in  his  work,  and  the  happier  he  was  in 
that  role  the  more  irksome  his  work  became.  "Maybe 
you  think  I  am  not  happy?"  he  writes.  "The  very 
thing  that  gravels  me  is  that  I  am.  I  don't  want  to 
be  happy  when  I  can't  work.  I  am  resolved  that 
hereafter  I  won't  be."  And  at  that  brilliant  apogee 
of  his  life,  when  his  daughter  noted  that  he  had  just 
become  interested  in  "mind-cure,"  he  took  up  his 
writing  quarters  in  the  billiard-room  where,  per- 
fect witness  that  he  was  to  the  truth  of  Herbert 
Spencer's  old  saw  about  billiard-playing  and  a  mis- 
spent youth,  he  was  ready  at  all  hours  to  receive  his 
friends  and  impress  them  into  the  game,  where,  indeed, 
he  could  almost  count  on  the  pleasure  of  being  inter- 
rupted. He,  whose  literary  work  had  become  a  mere 
appanage  of  his  domestic  life,  whose  writing  went  by 
fits  and  starts,  and  who  certainly  took  no  pains  to  keep 
himself  in  form  for  it,  had  such  a  passion  for  billiards 
that  he  would  play  all  night  and  "stay  till  the  last  man 

ge  out  from  sheer  exhaustion. ' ' 

For  all  his  exuberance,  in  short,  he  was  not,  on  the 
whole,  happy  in  his  work;  almost  from  the  beginning 
of  his  career  we  note  in  him  an  increasing  distaste  for" 
this  literary  journalism  which  he  would  hardly  have 
experienced  if  he  had  not  been  intended  for  quite 
another  life.  We  remember  that  cry  of  distress  when" 
he  was  setting  out  on  the  Quaker  City  excursion,  that 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         169 

cry  which  must  have  seemed  so  fantastically  meaning- 
less to  those  who  read  his  letter:  "I  am  so  worthless 
that  it  seems  to  me  I  never  do  anything  or  accomplish 
anything  that  lingers  in  my  mind  as  a  pleasant  memory. 
...  An  accusing  conscience  gives  me  peace  only  in 
excitement  and  restless  moving  from  place  to  place." 
What  was  it  but  the  conscience  of  the  artist  in  him, 
lulled  into  a  fitful  sleep  by  the  applause  of  all  America 
before  it  had  ever  been  able  quite  to  penetrate  into 
the  upper  layers  of  his  mind  ?  Mr.  Paine  has  noted  the 
change  in  tone  between  the  first  and  second  parts  of 
"Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  written  with  an  interval  of 
twelve  years,  the  change  from  "art"  to  "industry," 
the  difference  "between  the  labors  of  love  and  duty": 
he  avers  that  the  second  half  might  have  been  as  glam- 
orous as  the  first  if  Mark  Twain  had  revisited  the  river 
eight  or  ten  years  earlier,  "before  he  had  become  a 
theoretical  pessimist,  and  before  the  river  itself  had 
become  a  background  for  pessimism."  Mr.  Paine  would 
have  his  task  explaining,  in  that  connection,  the  dif- 
ference between  "theoretical"  pessimism  and  pessimism 
of  the  other  sort!  For  it  was  just  so  between  "The 
Innocents  Abroad"  and  "A  Tramp  Abroad";  it  was 
even  more  so  between  "A  Tramp  Abroad"  and  "Fol- 
lowing the  Equator":  "In  the  'Tramp,'"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "he  has  still  the  sense  of  humor,  but  he  has 
become  a  cynic ;  restrained,  but  a  cynic  none  the  less. ' ' 
All  that  descriptive  writing  in  which  alone,  perhaps, 
he  could  count  upon  an  absolutely  certain  financial  suc- 
cess— how  repellant  it  became  to  him  as  time  went  on! 
Watch  him  guilefully  trying  to  wriggle  out  of  the  self- 
imposed  task  of  "A  Tramp  Abroad."  He  tells  his 
friend  Twitchell  that  he  has  lost  his  Swiss  note-book, 
and,  who  knows?  perhaps  he  won't  have  to  write  the 
book,  after  all.  Then  the  note-book  comes  to  light,  and 
he  is  plunged  in  gloom:  "I  was  about  to  write  to  my 
publisher  and  propose  some  other  book,  when  the  con- 


170    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

founded  thing  turned  up,  and  down  went  my  heart  into 
my  boots."  It  seemed  to  him,  says  Mr.  Paine,  "that 
he  had  been  given  a  life-sentence."  And  to  what  does 
he  turn  for  relief?  "The  Prince  and  the  Pauper," 
which  he  lingers  over  and  cannot  bear  to  finish,  telling 
Mr.  Howells  that,  after  that  "veritable  nightmare"  of 
"A  Tramp  Abroad,"  nothing  can  diminish  his  jubilant 
delight  in  writing  it.  He  is  a  child  among  children 
again,  doing  a  task  that  almost  any  gifted  child  might 
have  done,  something  that  is  for  him  the  equivalent  of 
a  charade,  a  pretty  game  with  his  little  daughters,  and 
basking  for  the  moment  in  the  approval  of  his  wife. 

"We  have  seen — and  it  seems  to  me  the  most  conclusive 
proof  of  his  arrested  development — that  Mark  Twain 
/Showed  not  only  no  respect  for  literature  but  no  vital, 
(  personal  pride  in  his  own  pursuit  of  it.  What  is  the 
Vtrue  artist's  natural  attitude  toward  his  work?  Henry 
James,  in  his  finical,  exaggerated  fashion,  expressed  it, 
I  think — over-expressed  it,  in  his  passionate  anxiety  not 
to  do  so — in  something  he  wrote  ouee  of  his  early  tales : 
"I,  of  course,  really  and  truly  cared  for  them,  as  we 
say,  more  than  for  aught  else  whatever — cared  for  them 
with  that  kind  of  care,  infatuated  though  it  may  seem, 
that  makes  it  bliss  for  the  fond  votary  never  to  so  much 
as  speak  of  the  loved  object,  makes  it  a  refinement  of 
piety  to  perform  his  rites  under  cover  of  a  perfect  free- 
dom of  mind  as  to  everything  but  them."  Compare 
this  with  what  Mark  Twain  wrote  when  he  was  setting 
to  work  at  ' '  The  American  Claimant " :  "  My  right  arm 
is  nearly  disabled  with  rheumatism,  but  I  am  bound  to 
write  this  book  (and  sell  100,000  copies  of  it — no,  I 
mean  1,000,000 — next  fall).  I  feel  sure  I  can  dictate 
the  book  into  a  phonograph  if  I  don't  have  to  yell." 
That  is  only  an  extreme  instance  of  what  appears  to 
have  been  his  habitual  attitude  toward  his  work,  an 
attitude  of  almost  cynical  indifference,  of  insolence 
even. 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         171 

Once,  however,  he  approached  it  in  quite  a  different 
spirit,  with  a  significant  and  exceptional  result  that 
proves  the  rule.  "Though  the  creative  enthusiasm  in 
his  other  books  soon  passed,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "his  glory 
in  the  tale  of  Joan  never  died":  in  a  note  which  he 
made  on  his  seventy-third  birthday,  indeed,  when  all 
his  important  works  lay  far  behind  him,  he  said:  "I 
like  the  'Joan  of  Arc'  best  of  all  my  books;  and  it 
is  the  best;  I  know  it  perfectly  well."  Did  he  really 
consider  it  his  best  book?  We  shall  see  presently  that 
in  this,  as  in  other  matters,  his  judgment  was  quite 
unstable,  quite  unreliable,  quite  immature;  and  cer- 
tainly, beside  "Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "Tom  Sawyer," 
no  one  else  can  take  very  seriously  a  work  that  is,  for 
all  its  charm,  scarcely  anything  but  a  literary  chromo. 
Why,  then,  did  Mark  Twain  look  back  upon  it  with  such 
a  unique  satisfaction?  It  was  because  he  had  had  no 
ulterior  object  in  view  in  writing  it,  because,  for  once, 
in  this  book,  he  had  approached  his  work  in  the  spirit, 
at  least,  of  the  artist  and  the  craftsman.  "Possibly," 
we  find  him  writing  to  a  friend,  and  how  exceptional 
the  phrase  is  on  Mark  Twain's  pen! — "possibly  the 
book  may  not  sell,  but  that  is  nothing — it  was  written 
for  love."  But  more  striking  still  is  the  testimony  of 
a  later  note :  "  It  furnished  me  seven  times  the  pleasure 
afforded  me  by  any  of  the  others:  twelve  years  of 
preparation  and  two  years  of  writing.  The  others 
needed  no  preparation  and  got  none."  In  other  words, 
in  this  book  alone  he  had  consciously  exercised  the 
instinct  of  workmanship,  the  instinct  he  had  exercised 
in  that  career  as  a  pilot  to  which  he  always  looked  back 
so  regretfully.  What  if  "Huckleberry  Finn"  was  in- 
comparably greater?  What  if  he  had  for  "Tom  Saw- 
yer" a  peculiar,  an  intimately  proprietary,  affection? 
There  he  had  been  simply  the  "divine  amateur,"  im- 
provising the  tale  of  his  own  fond  memories;  and 
however  much  he  loved  them,  he  took  no  particular 


172     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

pride  in  the  writing  of  them ;  he  never  thought  of  pub- 
lishing them  anonymously,  as  he  published  "Joan"  at 
first,  lest  it  should  suffer  from  the  obloquy  of  a  pen- 
name  that  had  been  compromised  by  so  many  dubious 
ventures;  he  readily  acquiesced,  in  fact,  in  his  wife's 
attitude  of  indifference  toward  the  always  ungram- 
matical  and  often  improper  Odyssey  of  his  own  child- 
hood. With  "Joan  of  Arc"  it  was  different:  those 
twelve  years  of  preparation,  those  two  years  of  writing 
•were  the  secret  of  his  delight  in  it,  his  respect  for  it. 
A  poor  thing  but  indubitably  mine,  the  spirit  of  the 
artist  in  him  seems  to  be  saying — that  spirit  which 
came  into  its  own  so  late  and  burned  so  feebly  then 
and  was  so  quickly  gutted  out.  Did  he  not  call  it  "a 
book  which  writes  itself,  a  tale  which  tells  itself:  1 
merely  have  to  hold  the  pen"?  It  was  indeed  only 
in  the  dimmest  sense  a  creation;  it  was  nothing  but  a 
(rechauffe  for  children,  for  sentimental,  grown-up  chil- 
dren. Something  of  his  own  personality,  no  doubt, 
went  into  it,  the  animus  of  a  scarcely  conscious,  an 
obscurely  treasured,  ideal  of  the  heroic  life.  But  his 
pride  and  his  joy  in  the  book  sprang,  one  feels,  from  a 
more  specific  achievement :  he  had  never  known  so  fully 
before  what  absorption  means,  what  it  means  to  take 
pains  in  all  the  complicated  sense  of  honest  workman- 
ship. 

If  this  explanation  is  the  correct  one,  it  is  easy  in- 
deed to  determine  the  measure  of  Mark  Twain's 
maturity,  to  prove  that  he  was  at  the  same  time  a  born 
artist  and  one  who  never  developed  beyond  the  primi- 
tive stage.  Only  once,  and  with  a  significant  result  in 
his  own  confession,  have  we  found  him  working  at 
literature  as  the  artist  works.  But  think  of  the  care 
he  lavished  upon  lecturing  and  oral  story-telling!  He 
was,  says  Mr.  Howells,  "the  most  consummate  public 
performer  I  ever  saw.  ...  On  the  platform  he  was  the 
great  and  finished  actor  which  he  probably  would  not 


The  Playboy  in  Letters        173 

have  been  on  the  stage."  And  to  what  was  this  emi- 
nence due? — "his  carefully  studied  effects."  This  man, 
who  was  capable  of  all  but  "yelling"  his  books  into  a 
phonograph,  approached  the  platform  with  all  the  cir- 
cumspection of  a  conscious  master:  there  we  find  him 
prudent,  prescient,  self-respectful,  deliberately  taking 
pains,  as  he  shows  in  one  of  his  letters,  to  rest  and  equip 
himself  beforehand.  "Unless  I  get  a  great  deal  of 
rest,"  he  says,  and  he  makes  no  jokes  now  about  his 
"laziness,"  "a  ghastly  dullness  settles  down  upon  me 
on  the  platform,  and  turns  my  performance  into  work, 
and  hard  work,  whereas  it  ought  always  to  be  pastime, 
recreation,  solid  enjoyment."  There  is  the  voice  of  the 
artist,  the  prompting  of  the  true  craftsman 's  conscience. 
I  have  said  that  he  was  indifferent  to  technique,  abnor- 
mally incurious,  in  fact,  of  all  the  means  of  the  literary 
art.  But  who  that  has  read  his  essay,  "How  to  Tell  a 
Story,"  will  forget  the  proud  skill  of  the  raconteur  of 
"The  Golden  Arm"?  Those  who  imagine  that  an  artist 
is  just  an  inspired  child  of  nature  might  well  consider 
the  attitude  of  mind  revealed  in  this  little  essay.  Mark 
Twain  first  heard  the  story  of  the  "Golden  Arm" 
from  an  old  negro  to  whose  cabin  he  used  to  resort  as 
a  boy  in  Hannibal;  and  just  as  we  have  seen  him 
reverent  in  the  Holy  Land  because  of  the  initiation  of 
the  Sunday  School,  so  now  we  see  him  reverent  in  art 
because  of  the  initiation  of  that  first  master  who  had 
remained,  indeed,  save  for  Horace  Bixby,  the  pilot,  his 
only  master.  To  tell  that  story  rightly,  to  pause  just 
long  enough  in  just  the  proper  places,  to  enunciate  each 
word  with  just  the  accurate  emphasis,  and  at  last — oh ! 
so  warily,  oh!  so  carefully,  so  cautiously,  with  such 
control,  to  spring  that  final  effect  of  horror ! — there  was 
something  worthy  of  a  man's  passionate  endeavor!  Did 
not  Mark  Twain  assert  again  and  again,  in  his  old  age, 
that  no  one  can  rise  above  the  highest  limit  attainable 
through  the  "outside  helps  afforded  by  the  ideals,  influ- 


174     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ences,  and  training"  of  the  society  into  which  he  is 
born?  Who,  in  the  Gilded  Age  of  America,  cared  for 
literature,  cared  for  it  enough  to  celebrate  it,  to  glorify 
it,  to  live  it?  What  master  in  the  highest  of  the  arts 
had  Mark  Twain  ever  found  comparable  in  relative 
authority,  in  essential  authority,  with  that  old  negro 
raconteur,  that  old  pilot  of  the  Mississippi?  What  real 
criticism,  what  exacting  appreciation  had  Mark  Twain, 
the  writer,  ever  received  ?  Had  not  his  wife,  indifferent 
to  his  best  work,  encouraged  him  to  write  puerilities? 
Had  not  Howells  even,  the  "Critical  Court  of  Last 
Resort  in  this  country,"  praised  him  as  often  for  his 
ineptitudes  as  for  his  lucky  flights  of  genius?  Who 
had  expected  anything  of  him,  in  short,  or  put  him  on 
his  mettle  ?  But  at  least  America  understood  the  primi- 
tive art  of  oral  story-telling,  at  least  America  had 
understood  the  primitive  art  of  the  Mississippi  pilot: 
in  those  two  spheres,  and  in  those  alone,  Mark  Twain 
had  found  inspiring  masters,  he  had  encountered  a 
penetrating  criticism,  an  apt,  subtle  and  thrilling  appre- 
ciation ;  in  those  two  spheres  he  had  been  invited  to  pass 
muster  and  he  had  done  so !  What  if  he  had  never  read 
"Balzac  and  the  others"?  That  old  negro  of  his  child- 
hood, with  all  his  ancient,  inherited  folk-skill — he  was 
Mark  Twain's  Balzac,  and  no  young  novelist  ever  more 
fervently  humbled  himself  before  the  high  priest  of  his 
metier,  ever  more  passionately  drank  in  the  wisdom  of 
the  source,  ever  more  proudly  rose,  by  ardent  endeavor, 
to  the  point  where,  before  going  his  own  way,  he  could 
almost  do  what  the  high  priest  himself  had  done.  Mark 
Twain  had  never  individually  "come  into  his  intel- 
lectual consciousness,"  in  Mr.  Howells 's  phrase,  at  all; 
his  creative  spirit  had  remained  rudimentary  and  almost 
undifferentiated ;  but  that  his  natural  genius  was  very 
great  is  proved  once  more  by  the  extraordinary  zest 
with  which  he  threw  himself  into  those  approximately 
artistic  channels  he  found  open  before  him. 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         175 

It  was  one  of  Mark  Twain's  favorite  fancies,  Mr. 
Paine  says,  that  life  should  begin  with  old  age  and 
progress  backwards.  We  can  understand  it  now;  we 
can  understand  why  his  mind  was  essentially  retro- 
spective and  why  so  much  of  his  writing  deals  with  his 
childhood.  The  autobiographical  impulse  is  normal  in 
old  age :  when  men  cannot  build  on  hope  they  build  on 
memory,  their  minds  regress  into  the  past  because  they 
no  longer  have  a  future.  It  is  generally  understood, 
therefore,  that  when  people  in  middle  age  occupy  them- 
selves with  their  childhood  it  is  because  some  central 
instinct  in  them  has  been  blocked  by  either  internal 
or  external  obstacles :  their  consciousness  flows  backward 
until  it  reaches  a  period  in  their  memory  when,  life 
still  seemed  to  them  open  and  fluid  with  possibilities. 
Who  does  not  see  in  the  extraordinary  number  of  books 
about  boys  and  boyhood  written  by  American  authors 
the  surest  sign  of  the  prevalence  of  that  arrested  moral 
development  which  is  the  result  of  the  business  life,  the 
universal  repression  in  the  American  population  of  all 
those  impulses  that  conflict  with  commercial  success? 
So  it  was  with  Mark  Twain.  In  him  the  autobiograph- 
ical impulse,  characteristic  of  old  age,  awoke  very  early : 
as  far  back  as  1880  we  find  him  "attempting,  from 
time  to  time,"  according  to  Mr.  Paine,  "an  absolutely 
faithful  autobiography";  and  he  resumed  the  attempt 
in  1885,  at  the  time  when  he  was  assisting  Grant  with 
his  Memoirs.  It  remained  his  dominant  literary  im- 
pulse. "Earn  a  character  if  you  can,  and  if  you  can't," 
says  Pudd'nhead  Wilson,  "then  assume  one."  Mark 
Twain  had  "assumed"  the  character  of  his  middle 
years;  he  had  only  truly  lived,  he  had  only  been  him- 
self, as  a  child,  and  the  experience  of  childhood  was 
the  only  experience  he  had  assimilated.  That  is  why  he 
was  perpetually  recurring  to  his  early  life  in  Hannibal, 
why  the  books  he  wrote  con  amore  were  books  about 
childhood,  and  why  he  instinctively  wrote  not  only 


176    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

about,  but  also  for,  children.  By  doing  so  he  knew,  or 
something  in  him  knew,  what  many  another  American 
author  has  known  since,  that  he  was  capturing  the  whole 
public.  Ten  million  business  men — that  was  the  public, 
the  masculine  public,  of  Mark  Twain's  time.  And  are 
not  business  men  in  general,  in  a  sense  not  quite  in- 
tended by  the  coiner  of  the  phrase, ' '  children  of  a  larger 
growth"? 

Mark  Twain,  I  say,  instinctively  wrote  for  children. 
It  is  true  that  he  seems  often  to  have  believed  that 
"Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "Tom  Sawyer"  could  only 
be  understood  and  appreciated  by  mature  readers ;  cer- 
tainly "Joan  of  Arc"  was  put  forth  as  a  historical 
romance  for  mature  readers.  But  what  do  we  find  him 
saying  while  he  is  still  at  work  on  "Tom  Sawyer"? 
"I  finally  concluded  to  cut  the  Sunday  School  speech 
down  to  the  first  two  sentences,  leaving  no  suggestion 
of  satire,  since  the  book  is  to  be  for  boys  and  girls." 
And  as  for  "Joan  of  Arc,"  with  what  did  he  associate 
it  in  his  own  mind?  "I  am  writing,"  he  says  in  a  letter 
to  a  publishing  friend,  "a  companion  piece  to  'The 
Prince  and  the  Pauper,'  "  and  this,  added  to  the  fact 
that  he  wrote  it  in  constant,  sympathetic  consultation 
with  his  own  children,  is  the  best  extrinsic  proof  of  its 
real  character.  Written  for  children,  then,  more  than 
half  consciously,  all  these  books  were;  and  I  will  not 
except  even  "The  Mysterious  Stranger,"  permeated  as 
it  is  with  a  mood  that  is  purely  adolescent,  though  an 
old  man  wrote  it  and  few  children  probably  have  ever 
read  it.  Written  for  and  written  of  children  all  these 
books  were,  for  it  is  clear  that  the  protagonists  of  ' '  The 
Mysterious  Stranger"  are  the  boys  through  whose  eyes 
the  story  unfolds  itself  and  who  taste  its  bitterness,  and 
Joan  of  Arc,  seen  through  the  eyes  of  the  Sieur  de 
Conte,  is  a  child  also.  And  these,  I  say,  were  the  books 
he  wrote  with  love,  with  a  happiness  that  sometimes 
seemed  sacred  to  him.  It  was  this  happiness  that  haloed 


The  Playboy  in  Letters         177 

the  tale  of  Joan,  although  Professor  Phelps  says  that 
in  1904  he  spoke  of  "Huckleberry  Finn"  as  "undoubt- 
edly his  best  book";  and  that  he  had  for  "Tom  Sawyer" 
a  very  special  feeling  is  shown  in  a  letter,  one  of  those 
famous  "unmailed"  letters,  written  in  1887  to  a  the- 
atrical manager  who  had  dramatized  the  story  and  pro- 
posed to  put  it  on  the  stage:  "That  is  a  book,  dear  sir, 
which  cannot  be  dramatized.  One  might  as  well  try 
to  dramatize  any  other  hymn.  'Tom  Sawyer'  is 
simply  a  hymn,  put  into  prose  form  to  give  it  a  worldly 
air. ' '  There  were  plays  which  he  wrote  with  an  exuber- 
ant gaiety;  but  that  was  the  lusty  fun  of  the  man  of 
action,  the  boy  who  enjoyed  throwing  sticks  into  a 
swift  stream:  it  was  not  the  happiness  of  the  soul  in 
process  of  delivering  itself.  That  happiness,  I  say, 
sanctified  these  children's  books  alone — these  books  that 
suggest  the  green,  luxuriant  shoots  clustering  on  the 
stump  of  some  gigantic  tree  which  has  been  felled  close 
to  the  ground. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THOSE  EXTRAORDINARY  TWINS 

"Joy  with  us  is  the  monopoly  of  disreputable  characters." 

ALEXANDER   HABVEY. 

AT  the  circus,  no  doubt,  you  have  watched  some 
trained  lion  going  through  the  sad  motions  of  a 
career  to  which  the  tyrannical  curiosity  of  men  has 
constrained  him.  At  times  he  seems  to  be  playing  his 
part  with  a  certain  zest;  he  has  acquired  a  new  set  of 
superficial  habits,  and  you  would  say  that  he  finds  them 
easy  and  pleasant.  Under  the  surface,  however,  he 
remains  the  wild,  exuberant  creature  of  the  jungle.  It 
is  only  thanks  to  the  eternal  vigilance  of  his  trainers 
and  the  guiding-lines  they  provide  for  him  in  the  shape 
of  the  ring,  the  rack  and  all  the  rest  of  the  circus- 
paraphernalia  that  he  continues  to  enact  this  parody  of 
his  true  life.  Have  his  instincts  been  modified  by  the 
imposition  of  these  new  habits?  Look  at  him  at  the 
moment  when  the  trainer  ceases  to  crack  his  whip  and 
turns  his  back.  In  a  flash  another  self  has  possessed 
him:  in  his  glance,  in  his  furtive  gesture  you  perceive 
the  king  of  beasts  once  more.  The  sawdust  of  the  circus 
has  become  the  sand  of  the  desert;  twenty  thousand 
years  have  rolled  back  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye. 

So  it  was  with  Mark  Twain.  "We  have  no  real 
morals,"  he  wrote  in  one  of  his  later  letters,  "but  only 
artificial  ones,  morals  created  and  preserved  by  the 
forced  suppression  of  natural  and  healthy  instincts," 
Now  that  is  not  true  of  the  man  who  is  master  of  him- 
self. The  morality  of  the  free  man  is  not  based  upon 
178 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins      179 

the  suppression  of  his  instincts  but  upon  the  discreet 
employment  of  them:  it  is  a  real  and  not  an  artificial 
morality,  therefore,  because  the  whole  man  subscribes 
to  it.  Mark  Twain,  as  we  have  seen,  had  conformed, 
to  a  moral  regime  in  which  the  profoundest  of  his  in- 
stincts could  not  function :  the  artist  had  been  sub- 
merged in  the  bourgeois  gentleman,  the  man  of  business, 
the  respectable  Presbyterian  citizen.  To  play  his  part, 
therefore,  he  had  to  depend  upon  the  cues  his  wife  and 
his  friends  gave  him.  Here  we  have  the  explanation  of 
his  statement:  ''Outside  influences,  outside  circum- 
stances, wind  the  man  and  regulate  him.  Left  to  him- 
self, he  wouldn't  get  regulated  at  all,  and  the  sort  of 
time  he  would  keep  would  not  be  valuable."  We  can- 
see  from  this  how  completely  his  conscious  self  had 
accepted  the  point  of  view  of  his  trainers,  how  fully  he 
had  concurred  in  their  desire  to  repress  that  unmanage- 
able creative  instinct  of  his,  how  ashamed,  in  short,  he 
was  of  it.  Nevertheless,  that  instinct,  while  repressed, 
while  unconscious,  continued  to  live  and  manifest  itself 
just  the  same.  We  shall  see  that  in  the  end,  never  hav- 
ing been  able  to  develop,  to  express  itself,  to  fulfill  itself, 
to  air  itself  in  the  sun  and  the  wind  of  the  world,  it 
turned  as  it  were  black  and  malignant,  like  some  mon- 
strous, morbid  inner  growth,  poisoning  Mark  Twain's 
whole  spiritual  system.  We  have  now  to  note  its  con- 
stant blind  efforts  to  break  through  the  censorship  that 
had  been  imposed  on  it,  to  cross  the  threshold  of  the 
unconscious  and  play  its  part  in  the  conscious  life  of 
this  man  whose  will  was  always  enlisted  against  it. 

First  of  all,  a  few  instances  from  his  everyday  life. 
We  know  that  he  was  always  chafing  against  the  scheme 
of  values,  the  whole  social  regime,  that  was  represented 
by  his  wife  and  his  friends.  His  conscious  self  urged 
him  to  maintain  these  values  and  this  regime.  His  un- 
conscious self  strove  against  them,  vetoed  the  force 
behind  his  will,  pushed  him  in  just  the  opposite 


i8o    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

direction.  We  find  this  conflict  revealed  in  his  story, 
"Those  Extraordinary  Twins,"  about  an  Italian 
counterpart  of  the  famous  Siamese  monstrosity. 
"Whenever  Luigi  had  possession  of  the  legs,  he  car- 
ried Angelo  to  balls,  rumshops,  Sons  of  Liberty 
parades,  horse  races,  campaign  riots,  and  everywhere 
else  that  could  damage  him  with  his  party  and  his 
church;  and  when  it  was  Angelo 's  week  he  carried 
Luigi  diligently  to  all  manner  of  moral  and  religious 
gatherings,  doing  his  best  to  regain  the  ground  he  had 
lost. ' '  This  story  of  the  two  incompatible  spirits  bound 
^together  in  one  flesh  is,  as  we  can  see,  the  symbol  of 
Mark  Twain  himself. 

Glance  at  his  business  life.  He  pursued  it  with 
frantic  eagerness,  urged  on  by  the  self  that  loved  suc- 
cess, popularity,  prestige.  Yet  he  was  always  in  revolt 
against  it.  There  were  years  during  which  he  walked 
the  floor  at  night,  " over- wrought  and  unsettled,"  as  he 
said,  "by  apprehensions — badgered,  harassed" — and 
let  us  add  Mr.  Paine 's  adjectives — "worried,  impatient, 
rash,  frenzied  and  altogether  upset,"  till  he  had  to  beg 
the  fates  for  mercy,  till  he  had  to  send  his  agent  the 
pathetic,  imploring  appeal,  "Get  me  out  of  business!" 
Why  did  he  always  fail  in  those  spectacular  ventures  of 
his?  Was  it  not  because  his  will,  which  was  enlisted"] 
in  business,  was  not  supported  by  a  constant,  funda-  / 
mental  desire  to  succeed  in  it,  because,  in  fact,  his 
fundamental  desire  pointed  him  just  the  other  way? 

Then  there  was  his  conventional  domestic  and  social 
life.  He  had  submerged  himself  in  the  role  of  the  hus- 
band, the  father,  the  neighbor,  the  citizen.  At  once 
he  became  the  most  absent-minded  of  men !  His  absent- 
mindedness,  Mr.  Paine  assures  us,  was  "by  no  means  a 
development  of  old  age,"  and  he  mentions  two  typical 
instances  of  it  when  Mark  Twain  was  "in  the  very 
heyday  of  his  mental  strength."  Once,  when  the  house 
was  being  cleaned,  he  failed  to  recognize  the  pictures 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     181 

in  his  own  drawing-room  when  he  found  them  on  the 
floor,  and  accused  an  innocent  caller  of  having  brought 
them  there  to  sell.  Plainly  the  eye  of  the  householder 
was  not  confirmed  by  the  instinctive  love  that  makes  one 
observant.  The  vagrant  artist  in  him,  in  fact,  was 
always  protesting  against  the  lot  his  other  self  had  so 
fully  accepted,  the  lot  of  being  "bullyragged,"  as  he 
said,  by  builders  and  architects  and  tapestry-devils  and 
carpet-idiots  and  billiard-table-scoundrels  and  wildcat 
gardeners  when  what  was  really  needed  was  "an  in- 
cendiary." Moreover,  "he  was  always  forgetting 
engagements,"  we  are  told,  "or  getting  them  wrong." 
And  this  absent-mindedness  had  its  tragic  results  too, 
for  because  of  it,  to  his  own  everlasting  remorse,  Mark 
Twain  became  the  innocent  cause  of  the  death  of  one 
of  his  children  and  only  just  escaped  being  the  cause 
of  the  death  of  another.  On  one  occasion,  he  was  driv- 
ing with  his  year-old  son  on  a  snowy  day  and  was  so 
extraordinarily  negligent  that  he  let  him  catch  a  severe 
cold  which  developed  into  a  fatal  pneumonia;  on  the 
other,  when  he  was  out  with  one  of  his  little  daughters, 
he  inadvertently  let  go  of  the  perambulator  and  the 
baby,  after  a  frightful  slide  down  a  steep  hill,  tumbled 
out,  with  her  head  bleeding,  among  the  stones  by  the 
roadside.  "I  should  not  have  been  permitted  to  do  it," 
he  said  of  this  first  misadventure.  "I  was  not  qualified 
for  any  such  responsibility  as  that.  Some  one  should 
have  gone  who  had  at  least  the  rudiments  of  a  mind. 
Necessarily  I  would  lose  myself  dreaming."  Yes,  Mark 
Twain  was  day-dreaming:  that  mind  in  which  the  filial 
and  paternal  instincts  had  almost  supplanted  every 
other  caught  itself  wandering  at  the  critical  hour !  And 
in  that  hour  the  "old  Adam,"  the  natural  man,  the 
suppressed  poet,  registered  its  tragic  protest,  took  its 
revenge,  against  a  life  that  had  left  no  room  for  it. 
Truth  comes  out  in  the  end.  The  most  significant  comment 
on  Mark  Twain 's  constant  absent-mindedness  as  regards 


l82    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

domestic  matters  is  to  be  found  in  Mr.  Paine 's  record 
that  in  his  dictations  in  old  age  he  was  extremely  in- 
accurate on  every  subject  except  the  genesis  and  writ- 
ing of  his  books.  "We  can  see  from  this  that  although 
his  conscious  life  had  been  overwhelmingly  occupied 
with  non-artistic  and  anti-artistic  interests,  his  "heart," 
as  we  say,  had  always  been,  not  in  them,  but  in  litera- 
ture. 

And  how  can  we  explain  the  fervor  with  which  this 
comrade  of  Presbyterian  ministers  and  pillars  of  society, 
this  husband  of  that  "heavenly  whiteness,"  Mrs. 
Clemens,  jots  in  his  note-book  observations  like  the 
following:  "We  may  not  doubt  that  society  in  heaven 
consists  mainly  of  undesirable  persons"?  How  can 
we  explain  that  intemperate,  that  vehement,  that  furi- 
ous obsession  of  animosity  against  the  novels  of  Jane 
Austen  except  as  an  indirect  venting  of  his  hatred  of 
the  primness  and  priggishness  of  his  own  entourage? 
I  should  go  even  further,  I  should  be  even  more  specific, 
than  this.  Mr.  Howells  had  been  Mark  Twain's  literary 
mentor;  Mr.  Howells  had  "licked  him  into  shape,"  had 
regenerated  him  artistically  as  his  wife  had  regenerated 
him  socially ;  Mr.  Howells  had  set  his  pace  for  him,  and 
Mark  Twain,  the  candidate  for  gentility,  had  been  over- 
flowingly  grateful.  "Possibly,"  he  had  written  to  this 
father  confessor,  "possibly  you  will  not  be  a  fully 
accepted  classic  until  you  have  been  dead  one  hundred 
years — it  is  the  fate  of  the  Shakespeares  of  all  genuine 
professions — but  then  your  books  will  be  as  common  as 
Bibles,  I  believe.  In  that  day,  I  shall  be  in  the  encyclo- 
pedias too,  thus:  'Mark  Twain,  history  and  occupation 
unknown;  but  he  was  personally  acquainted  with 
Howells.'  '  "We  know,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  that  he 
delighted  in  the  delicacy  of  How  ells 's  mind  and  lan- 
guage. But  this  taste  was  wholly  unrelated  to  anything 
else  in  Mark  Twain's  literary  horizon.  We  can  say, 
with  all  the  more  certainty  because  he  "detested"  novels 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins      183 

in  general,  that  if  Howells's  novels  had  been  written  by 
any  one  else  than  his  friend  and  his  mentor  he  would 
have  ignored  them  as  he  ignored  all  other  "artistic" 
writing,  he  would  even  have  despised  them  as  he  de- 
spised all  insipid  writing.  In  short,  this  taste  was  a 
product  of  personal  affection  and  gratitude;  it  was 
precisely  on  a  par  with  his  attitude  toward  the  pro- 
vincial social  daintinesses  of  his  wife.  And  in  both 
cases,  just  in  the  measure  that  his  conscious  self  had 
accepted  these  alien  standards  that  had  been  imposed 
upon  him,  his  unconscious  self  revolted  against  them. 
"I  never  saw  a  woman  so  hard  to  please,"  he  writes  in 
1875,  "about  things  she  doesn't  know  anything  about." 
Mr.  Paine  hastens  to  assure  us  that  "the  reference  to 
his  wife's  criticism  in  this  is  tenderly  playful,  as 
always."  But  what  a  multitude  of  dark  secrets  that 
tender  playfulness  covers!  Mark  Twain's  unconscious 
self  barely  discloses  its  claws  in  phrases  like  that, 
enough  to  show  how  strict  was  the  censorship  he  had 
accepted.  It  cannot  express  itself  directly;  conse- 
quently, like  a  child  who,  desiring  to  strike  its  teacher, 
stamps  upon  the  floor  instead,  it  pours  out  its  accumu- 
lated bitterness  obliquely.  When  Mark  Twain  utters 
such  characteristic  aphorisms  as  "Heaven  for  climate, 
hell  for  society,"  we  see  the  repressed  artist  in  him 
striking  out  at  Mrs.  Clemens  and  the  Reverend  Joseph 
Twitchell,  whose  companionship  the  dominant  Mark 
Twain  called,  and  with  reason,  for  he  seems  to  have 
been  the  most  lovable  of  men,  "a  companionship  which 
to  me  stands  first  after  Livy's."  Similarly,  when  he 
roars  and  rages  against  the  novels  of  Jane  Austen  we 
can  see  that  buried  self  taking  vengeance  upon  Mr. 
Howells,  with  whom  Jane  Austen  was  a  prime  passion, 
who  had  even  taken  Jane  Austen  as  a  model. 

We  know  the  constraint  to  which  he  submitted  as 
regards  religious  observances.  "And  once  or  twice," 
he  writes,  "I  smouched  a  Sunday  when  the  boss  wasn't 


'184     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

looking.  Nothing  is  half  so  good  as  literature  hooked 
on  Sunday,  on  the  sly."  Does  it  not  explain  the  bitter 
animus  that  lies  behind  his  comical  complaint  of  George 
W.  Cable,  when  the  two  were  together  on  a  lecture  tour  ? 
— "You  will  never,  never  know,  never  divine,  guess, 
imagine,  how  loathsome  a  thing  the  Christian  religion 
can  be  made  until  you  come  to  know  and  study  Cable 
daily  and  hourly.  ...  He  has  taught  me  to  abhor  and 
detest  the  Sabbath-day  and  hunt  up  new  and  trouble- 
some ways  to  dishonor  it."  Habitually,  as  we  have 
seen,  he  spoke  of  himself  in  public  as  a  Presbyterian, 
as  ' '  T witchell  's  parishioner. ' '  His  buried  self  redressed 
the  balance  in  a  passionate  admiration  for  Robert  Inger- 
soll,  the  atheist.  "Thank  you  most  heartily  for  the 
books,"  he  writes  to  Ingersoll  in  1879.  "I  am  devour- 
ing them — they  have  found  a  hungry  place,  and  they 
content  it  and  satisfy  it  to  a  miracle."  What,  in  fact, 
were  the  books  he  loved  best?  We  find  him  reading 
Andrew  D.  White's  "Science  and  Religion,"  Lecky's 
"European  Morals"  and  similar  books  of  a  rationalistic 
tendency.  But  his  favorite  authors — after  Voltaire, 
whom  he  had  read  as  a  pilot — were  Pepys,  Seutonius 
and  Saint- Simon.  Saint-Simon's  "Memoirs"  he  said 
he  had  read  twenty  times,  and  we  gather  that  he  almost 
learned  by  heart  Seutonius 's  record  of  "the  cruelties 
and  licentiousness  of  imperial  Rome."  Why  did  he 
take  such  passionate  pleasure  in  books  of  this  kind,  in 
writers  who  had  so  freely  "spoken  out"  Hear  what 
he  says  in  1904  regarding  his  own  book,  "What  Is 
Man?" — "Am  I  honest?  I  give  you  my  word  of  honor 
(privately)  I  am  not.  For  seven  years  I  have  sup- 
pressed a  book  which  my  conscience  tells  me  I  ought 
to  publish.  I  hold  it  a  duty  to  publish  it.  There  are 
other  difficult  tasks  I  am  equal  to,  but  I  am  not  equal 
to  that  one."  And  when  at  last  he  did  publish  it, 
anonymously,  it  was  with  this  foreword:  "Every 
thought  in  them  [these  papers]  has  been  thought  (and 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     185 

accepted  as  unassailable  truth)  by  millions  upon  mil- 
lions of  men — and  concealed,  kept  private.  Why  did 
they  not  speak  out?  Because  they  dreaded  (and  could 
not  bear)  the  disapproval  of  the  people  around  them. 
Why  have  not  I  published?  The  same  reason  has  re- 
strained me,  I  think.  I  can  find  no  other."  There  we 
see,  in  all  its  absolutism,  the  censorship  under  which 
his  creative  self  was  laboring.  One  can  easily  under- 
stand his  love  for  Saint-Simon  and  Casanova  and  why, 
in  private,  he  was  perpetually  praising  their  "unre- 
strained frankness." 

And  is  there  any  other  explanation  of  his  "Eliza- 
bethan breadth  of  parlance"?  Mr.  Howells  confesses 
that  he  sometimes  blushed  over  Mark  Twain's  letters, 
that  there  were  some  which,  to  the  very  day  when  he 
wrote  his  eulogy  on  his  dead  friend,  he  could  not  bear 
to  reread.  Perhaps  if  he  had  not  so  insisted,  in  former 
years,  while  going  over  Mark  Twain's  proofs,  upon 
"having  that  swearing  out  in  an  instant,"  he  would 
never  have  had  cause  to  suffer  from  his  having  "loosed 
his  bold  fancy  to  stoop  on  rank  suggestion."  Mark 
Twain's  verbal  Rabelaisianism  was  obviously  the  ex- 
pression of  that  vital  sap  which,  not  having  been  per- 
mitted to  inform  his  work,  had  been  driven  inward  and 
left  there  to  ferment.  No  wonder  he  was  always 
indulging  in  orgies  of  forbidden  words.  Consider  the 
famous  book,  "1601,"  that  "fireside  conversation  in  the 
time  of  Queen  Elizabeth":  is  there  any  obsolete  verbal 
indecency  in  the  English  language  that  Mark  Twain 
has  not  painstakingly  resurrected  and  assembled  there? 
He,  whose  blood  was  in  constant  ferment  and  who  could 
not  contain  within  the  narrow  bonds  that  had  been  set 
for  him  the  riotous  exuberance  of  his  nature,  had  to 
have  an  escape-valve,  and  he  poured  through  it  a  fetid 
stream  of  meaningless  obscenity — the  waste  of  a  price- 
less psychic  material!  Mr.  Paine  speaks  of  an  address 
he  made  at  a  certain  "Stomach  Club"  in  Paris  which 


i86    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

has  "obtained  a  wide  celebrity  among  the  clubs  of  the 
world,  though  no  line  of  it,  or  even  its  title,  has  ever 
found  its  way  into  published  literature."  And  who 
has  not  heard  one  or  two  of  the  innumerable  Mark 
Twain  anecdotes  in  the  same  vein  that  are  current 
in  every  New  York  publishing  house? 

In  all  these  ways,  I  say,  these  blind,  indirect,  extrava- 
gant, wasteful  ways,  the  creative  self  in  Mark  Twain 
constantly  strove  to  break  through  the  censorship  his 
own  will  had  accepted,  to  cross  the  threshold  of  the 
unconscious.  "A  literary  imp,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "was 
always  lying  in  wait  for  Mark  Twain,  the  imp  of  the 
burlesque,  tempting  him  to  do  the  outre,  the  outlandish, 
the  shocking  thing.  It  was  this  that  Olivia  Clemens  had 
to  labor  hardest  against."  Well  she  labored,  and  well 
Mark  Twain  labored  with  her !  It  was  the  spirit  of  the 
artist,  bent  upon  upsetting  the  whole  apple-cart  of 
bourgeois  conventions.  They  could,  and  they  did,  keep 
it  in  check;  they  arrested  it  and  manhandled  it  and 
thrust  it  back;  they  shamed  it  and  heaped  scorn  upon 
it  and  prevented  it  from  interfering  too  much  with  the 
respectable  tenor  of  their  daily  search  for  prestige  and 
success.  They  could  baffle  it  and  distort  it  and  oblige 
it  to  assume  ever  more  complicated  and  grotesque  dis- 
guises in  order  to  elude  them,  but  they  could  not  kill  it. 
In  ways  of  which  they  were  unaware  it  escaped  their 
vigilance  and  registered  itself  in  a  sort  of  cipher,  for  us 
of  another  generation  who  have  eyes  to  read,  upon  the 
texture  of  Mark  Twain's  writings. 

For  is  it  not  perfectly  plain  that  Mark  Twain 's  books 
are  shot  through  with  all  sorts  of  unconscious  revela- 
tions of  this  internal  conflict?  In  the  Freudian 
psychology  the  dream  is  an  expression  of  a  suppressed 
wish.  In  dreams  we  do  what  our  inner  selves  desire  to 
do  but  have  been  prevented  from  doing  either  by  the 
exigencies  of  our  daily  routine,  or  by  the  obstacles 
of  convention,  or  by  some  other  form  of  censorship 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     187 

which  has  been  imposed  upon  us,  or  •which  we  our- 
selves, actuated  by  some  contrary  desire,  have  will- 
ingly accepted.  Many  other  dreams,  however,  are  not 
so  simple:  they  are  often  incoherent,  nonsensical,  ab- 
surd. In  such  cases  it  is  because  two  opposed  wishes, 
neither  of  which  is  fully  satisfied,  have  met  one  another 
and  resulted  in  a  "compromise" — a  compromise  that 
is  often  as  apparently  chaotic  as  the  collision  of  two 
railway  trains  running  at  full  speed.  These  mechan- 
isms, the  mechanisms  of  the  "wish-fulfillment"  and  the 
"wish-conflict,"  are  evident,  as  Freud  has  shown,  in 
many  of  the  phenomena  of  everyday  life.  Whenever, 
for  any  reason,  the  censorship  is  relaxed,  the  censor  is 
off  guard,  whenever  we  are  day-dreaming  and  give  way 
to  our  idle  thoughts,  then  the  unconscious  bestirs  itself 
and  rises  to  the  surface,  gives  utterance  to  those  embar- 
rassing slips  of  the  tongue,  those  "tender  playful- 
nesses," that  express  our  covert  intentions,  slays  our 
adversaries,  sets  our  fancies  wandering  in  pursuit  of  all 
the  ideals  and  all  the  satisfactions  upon  which  our  cus- 
tomary life  has  stamped  its  veto.  In  Mark  Twain's 
books,  or  rather  in  a  certain  group  of  them,  his  "fan- 
tasies" we  can  see  this  process  at  work.  Certain  sig- 
nificant obsessions  reveal  themselves  there,  certain  fixed 
ideas;  the  same  themes  recur  again  and  again.  "I  am 
writing  from  the  grave,"  he  notes  in  later  life,  regard- 
ing some  manuscripts  that  are  not  to  be  published  until 
after  his  death.  ' '  On  these  terms  only  can  a  man  be  ap- 
proximately frank.  He  cannot  be  straightly  and  un- 
qualifiedly frank  either  in  the  grave  or  out  of  it." 
When  he  wrote  "Captain  Stormfield's  Visit  to  Heaven," 
"Pudd'iihead  Wilson,"  "The  American  Claimant," 
"Those  Extraordinary  Twins,"  he  was  frank  without 
knowing  it.  He,  the  unconscious  artist,  who,  when  he 
wrote  his  Autobiography,  found  that  he  was  unable  to 
tell  the  truth  about  himself,  has  conducted  us  unawares 
in  these  writings  into  the  penetralia  of  his  soul, 


i88     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Let  us  note,  prefatorily,  that  in  each  case  Mark  Twain 
was  peculiarly,  for  the  time  being,  free  of  his  censor- 
ship. That  he  wrote  at  least  the  first  draft  of  "Cap- 
tain Stormfield"  in  reckless  disregard  of  it  is  proved 
by  the  fact  that  for  forty  years  he  did  not  dare  to 
publish  the  book  at  all  but  kept  it  locked  away  in  his 
safe.  As  for  "The  American  Claimant,"  "Pudd'n- 
head  Wilson,"  and  "Those  Extraordinary  Twins,"  he 
wrote  them  at  the  time  of  the  failure  of  the  Paige  Type- 
setting Machine.  Shortly  before,  he  had  been  on  the 
dizziest  pinnacle  of  worldly  expectation.  Calculating 
what  his  returns  from  the  machine  were  going  to  be,  he 
had  "covered  pages,"  according  to  Mr.  Paine,  "with 
figures  that  never  ran  short  of  millions,  and  frequently 
approached  the  billion  mark."  Then,  suddenly,  re- 
duced to  virtual  bankruptcy,  lie  found  himself  once 
more  dependent  upon  authorship  for  a  living.  He  had 
passed,  in  short,  through  a  profound  nervous  and  emo- 
tional cataclysm:  "so  disturbed  were  his  affairs,  so  dis- 
ordered was  everything,"  we  are  told,  "that  sometimes 
he  felt  himself  as  one  walking  amid  unrealities."  At 
such  times,  we  know,  the  bars  of  the  spirit  fall  down; 
people  commit  all  sorts  of  aberrations,  "go  off  the  han- 
dle," as  we  say;  the  moral  habits  of  a  lifetime  give 
way  and  man  becomes  more  or  less  an  irresponsible 
animal.  In  Mark  Twain's  case,  at  least,  the  result 
was  a  violent  effort  on  the  part  of  his  suppressed  self 
to  assert  its  supremacy  in  a  propitious  moment  when 
that  other  self,  the  business  man,  had  proved  abysmally 
weak.  That  is  why  these  books  that  marked  his  return 
to  literature  appear  to  have  the  quality  of  nightmares. 
He  has  told  us  in  the  preface  to  ' '  Those  Extraordinary 
Twins"  that  the  story  had  originally  been  a  part  of 
"Pudd'nhead  "Wilson":  he  had  seen  a  picture  of  an 
Italian  monstrosity  like  the  Siamese  Twins  and  had 
meant  to  write  an  extravagant  farce  about  them;  but, 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     189 

he  adds,  "the  story  changed  itself  from  a  farce  to  a 
tragedy  while  I  was  going  along  with  it — a  most  em- 
barrassing circumstance."  Eventually,  he  realized  that 
it  was  "not  one  story  but  two  stories  tangled  together" 
that  he  was  trying  to  tell,  so  he  removed  the  twins  from 
"Pudd'nhead  Wilson"  and  printed  the  two  tales  sepa- 
rately. That  alone  shows  us  the  confusion  of  his  mind, 
the  confusion  revealed  further  in  "The  American 
Claimant"  and  in  "Pudd'nhead  Wilson"  as  it  stands. 
They  are,  I  say,  like  nightmares,  these  books:  full  of 
passionate  conviction  that  turns  into  a  burlesque  of 
itself,  angry  satire,  hysterical  humor.  They  are  triple- 
headed  chimeras,  in  short,  that  leave  the  reader's  mind 
in  tumult  and  dismay.  The  censor  has  so  far  relaxed 
its  hold  that  the  unconscious  has  risen  up  to  the  sur- 
face: the  battle  of  the  two  Mark  Twains  takes  place 
almost  in  the  open,  under  our  very  eyes. 

Glance  now,  among  these  dreams,  at  a  simple  exam- 
ple of  "wish-fulfillment."  When  Captain  Stormfield 
arrives  in  heaven,  he  is  surprised  to  find  that  all  sorts 
of  people  are  esteemed  among  the  celestials  who  have 
had  no  esteem  at  all  on  earth.  Among  them  is  Edward 
J.  Billings  of  Tennessee.  He  was  a  poet  during  his 
lifetime,  but  the  Tennessee  village  folk  scoffed  at  him; 
they  would  have  none  of  him,  they  made  cruel  sport 
of  him.  In  heaven  things  are  different;  there  the  celes- 
tials recognize  the  divinity  of  his  spirit,  and  in  token 
of  this  Shakespeare  and  Homer  walk  backward  before 
•him. 

Here,  as  we  see,  Mark  Twain  is  unconsciously  describ- 
ing the  actual  fate  of  his  own  spirit  and  that  ample 
other  fate  his  spirit  desires.  It  is  the  story  of  Cin- 
derella, the  despised  step-sister  who  is  vindicated  by  the 
prince's  favor,  rewritten  in  terms  personal  to  the  au- 
thor. We  note  the  significant  parallel  that  the  Tennes- 
see village  where  the  unappreciated  poet  lived  to  the 


190    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

scornful  amusement  of  his  neighbors  is  a  duplicate  of 
the  village  in  which  Mark  Twain  had  grown  up,  the 
milieu  of  Huck  Finn  and  Tom  Sawyer. 

This  inference  is  corroborated  by  the  similar  plight 
of  Pudd'nhead  Wilson,  the  sardonic  philosopher  whom 
we  should  have  identified  with  Mark  Twain  even  if  the 
latter  had  not  repeatedly  assured  us  that  an  author 
draws  himself  in  all  his  characters,  even  if  we  did  not 
know  that  Pudd'nhead 's  "calendar"  was  so  far  Mark 
Twain's  own  calendar  that  he  continued  it  in  two  later 
books,  "Following  the  Equator"  and  "A  Double-Bar- 
relled Detective  Story."  Pudd'nhead,  in  short,  is  sim- 
ply another  Edward  J.  Billings  and  the  village  folk 
treat  him  in  just  the  same  fashion.  "For  some  years," 
says  the  author,  "Wilson  had  been  privately  at  work 
on  a  whimsical  almanac,  for  his  amusement — a  calendar, 
with  a  little  dab  of  ostensible  philosophy,  usually  in 
ironical  form,  appended  to  each  date,  and  the  Judge 
thought  that  these  quips  and  fancies  of  Wilson's  were 
neatly  turned  and  cute ;  so  he  carried  a  handful  of  them 
around  one  day,  and  read  them  to  some  of  the  chief 
citizens.  But  irony  was  not  for  those  people ;  their  men- 
tal vision  was  not  focussed  for  it.  They  read  those 
playful  trifles  in  the  solidest  earnest  and  decided  with- 
out hesitancy  that  if  there  ever  had  been  any  doubt  that 
Dave  Wilson  was  a  pudd'nhead — which  there  hadn't — 
this  revelation  removed  that  doubt  for  good  and  all." 
And  hear  how  the  half-breed  Tom  Driscoll  baits  him 
before  all  the  people  in  the  square:  "Dave's  just  an 
all-round  genius — a  genius  of  the  first  water,  gentle- 
men; a  great  scientist  running  to  seed  here  in  this 
village,  a  prophet  with  the  kind  of  honor  that  prophets 
generally  get  at  home — for  here  they  don't  give  shucks 
for  his  scientifics,  and  they  call  his  skull  a  notion-factory 
— hey,  Dave,  ain't  it  so?  .  .  .  Come,  Dave,  show  the  gen- 
tlemen what  an  inspired  Jack-at-all-science  we've  got 
in  this  town  and  don't  know  it."  Is  it  possible  to  doubt 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     191 

that  here,  more  than  half  consciously,  Mark  Twain  was 
picturing  the  fate  that  had,  in  so  real  a  sense,  made  a 
buffoon  of  him?  Hardly,  when  we  consider  the  vindic- 
tive delight  with  which  he  pictures  Pudd'nhead  out- 
manoeuvring the  village  folk  and  triumphing  over  them 
in  the  end. 

Observe,  now,  the  deadly  temperamental  earnestness 
of  "The  Man  That  Corrupted  Iladleyburg, "  a  story 
written  late  in  life  when  his  great  fame  and  position  en- 
abled him  to  override  the  censorship  and  speak  with 
more  or  less  candor.  "The  temptation  and  the  down- 
fall of  a  whole  town,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "was  a  colossal 
idea,  a  sardonic  idea,  and  it  is  colossally  and  sardoni- 
cally worked  out.  Human  weakness  and  rotten  moral 
force  were  never  stripped  so  bare  or  so  mercilessly 
jeered  at  in  the  market-place.  For  once  Mark  Twain 
could  hug  himself  with  glee  in  derision  of  self-righteous- 
ness, knowing  that  the  world  would  laugh  with  him,  and 
that  none  would  be  so  bold  as  to  gainsay  his  mockery. 
Probably  no  one  but  Mark  Twain  ever  conceived  the 
idea  of  demoralizing  a  whole  community — of  making  its 
'nineteen  leading  citizens'  ridiculous  by  leading  them 
into  a  cheap,  glittering  temptation,  and  having  them 
yield  and  openly  perjure  themselves  at  the  very  moment 
when  their  boasted  incorruptibility  was  to  amaze  the 
world."  It  was  the  "leading  citizens,"  the  pillars  of 
society  Mark  Twain  had  himself  been  hobnobbing  with 
all  those  years,  the  very  people  in  deference  to  whom  he 
had  suppressed  his  true  opinions,  his  real  desires,  who 
despised  him  for  what  he  was  and  admired  him  only  for 
the  success  he  had  attained  in  spite  of  it — it  was  these 
people,  his  friends,  who  had,  in  so  actual  a  sense,  im- 
posed upon  him,  that  he  attacks  in  this  terrible  story  of 
the  passing  stranger  who  took  such  a  vitriolic  joy  in  ex- 
posing their  pretensions  and  their  hypocrisy.  ' '  I  passed 
through  your  town  at  a  certain  time,  and  received  a 
deep  offense  which  I  had  not  earned.  ...  I  wanted 


192     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

to  damage  every  man  in  the  place,  and  every  woman." 
Is  not  that  the  unmistakable  voice  of  the  misprized 
poet  and  philosopher  in  Mark  Twain,  the  worm  that 
has  turned,  the  angel  that  has  grown  diabolic  in  a 
world  that  has  refused  to  recognize  its  divinity  ? 

Here,  I  say,  in  these  two  or  three  instances,  we  have 
the  "wish-fulfillment"  in  its  clearest  form.  Elsewhere 
we  find  the  wish,  the  desire  of  the  suppressed  poet  for 
self -effectuation,  expressing  itself  in  many  vague  hopes 
and  vague  regrets.  It  is  the  sentiment  of  the  suppressed 
poet  in  all  of  us  that  he  voices  in  his  letter  to  Howells 
about  the  latter 's  novel,  "Indian  Summer" — saying 
that  it  gives  a  body  "a  cloudy  sense  of  his  having 
been  a  prince,  once,  in  some  enchanted,  far-off  land, 
and  of  being  an  exile  now,  and  desolate — and  Lord,  no 
chance  ever  to  get  back  there  again!"  And  consider 
the  unfinished  tale  of  "The  Mysterious  Chamber,"  "the 
story,"  as  Mr.  Paine  describes  it,  "of  a  young  lover 
who  is  accidentally  locked  behind  a  secret  door  in  an 
old  castle  and  cannot  announce  himself.  He  wanders 
at  last  down  into  subterranean  passages  beneath  the 
castle,  and  he  lives  in  this  isolation  for  twenty  years." 
There  is  something  inescapably  personal  about  that. 
As  for  the  character  of  the  Colonel  Sellers  of  "The 
American  Claimant" — so  different  from  the  Colonel 
Sellers  of  "The  Gilded  Age,"  who  is  supposed  to  be 
the  same  man  and  whom  Mark  Twain  had  drawn  after 
one  of  his  uncles — every  one  has  noted  that  it  is  a  bur- 
lesque upon  his  own  preposterous  business  life.  Isn't  it 
more  than  this?  That  rightful  claimant  to  the  great 
title  of  nobility,  living  in  exile  among  those  fantastic 
dreams  of  wealth  that  always  deceive  him — isn't  he  the 
obscure  projection  of  the  lost  heir  in  Mark  Twain  him- 
self, inept  in  the  business  life  he  is  living,  incapable 
of  substantiating  his  claim,  and  yet  forever  beguiled 
by  the  hope  that  some  day  he  is  going  to  win  his  true 
rank  and  live  the  life  he  was  intended  for?  The 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins     193 

shadowy  claim  of  Mark  Twain's  mother's  family  to  an 
English  earldom  is  not  sufficient  to  account  for  his  con- 
stant preoccupation  with  this  idea. 

Just  before  Mark  Twain's  death,  he  recalled,  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "one  of  his  old  subjects,  Dual  Personality,  and 
discussed  various  instances  that  flitted  through  his  mind 
— Jekyll  and  Hyde  phases  in  literature  and  fact. ' '  One 
of  his  old  subjects,  Dual  Personality!  Could  he  ever 
have  been  aware  of  the  extent  to  which  his  writings  re- 
vealed that  conflict  in  himself  ?  Why  was  he  so  obsessed 
by  journalistic  facts  like  the  Siamese  Twins  and  the 
Tichborne  case,  with  its  theme  of  the  lost  heir  and  the 
usurper?  Why  is  it  that  the  idea  of  changelings  in  the 
cradle  perpetually  haunted  his  mind,  as  we  can  see  from 
"Puddn'head  Wilson"  and  "The  Gilded  Age"  and  the 
variation  of  it  that  constitutes  "The  Prince  and  the 
Pauper"?  The  prince  who  has  submerged  himself  in 
the  role  of  the  beggar-boy — Mark  Twain  has  drawn  him- 
self there,  just  as  he  has  drawn  himself  in  the  "William 
Wilson"  theme  of  "The  Facts  Concerning  the  Recent 
Carnival  of  Crime  in  Connecticut,"  where  he  ends  by 
dramatically  slaying  the  conscience  that  torments  him. 
And  as  for  that  pair  of  incompatibles  bound  together  in 
one  flesh — the  Extraordinary  Twins,  the  "good"  boy 
who  has  followed  the  injunctions  of  his  mother  and  the 
"bad"  boy  of  whom  society  disapproves — how  many 
of  Mark  Twain's  stories  and  anecdotes  turn  upon  that 
same  theme,  that  same  juxtaposition! — does  he  not  re- 
veal there,  in  all  its  nakedness,  as  I  have  said,  the  true 
history  of  his  life? 

We  have  observed  that  in  Pudd'nhead's  aphorisms 
Mark  Twain  was  expressing  his  true  opinions,  the  opin- 
ions of  the  cynic  he  had  become  owing  to  the  suppres- 
sion and  the  constant  curdling  as  it  were  of  the  poet  in 
him.  While  his  pioneer  self  was  singing  the  praises  of 
American  progress  and  writing  "A  Connecticut  Yankee 
at  the  Court  of  King  Arthur,"  the  disappointed  poet 


194    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

kept  up  a  refrain  like  this :  ' '  October  12,  the  discovery. 
It  was  wonderful  to  find  America,  but  it  would  have 
been  more  wonderful  to  lose  it."  In  all  this  group 
of  writings  we  have  been  discussing,  however,  we  can 
see  that  while  the  censorship  had  been  sufficiently  relaxed 
in  the  general  confusion  of  his  life  to  permit  his  un- 
conscious to  rise  to  the  surface,  it  was  still  vigilant 
enough  to  cloak  its  real  intentions.  It  is  in  secret  that 
Pudd'nhead  jots  down  his  saturnine  philosophy;  it  is 
only  in  secret,  in  a  private  diary  like  Pudd'nhead's, 
that  young  Lord  Berkeley,  in  "The  American  Claim- 
ant," thinks  of  recording  his  views  of  this  fraudulent 
democracy  where  "prosperity  and  position  constitute 
rank."  Here,  as  in  the  malevolent,  3Iephistophelian 
"passing  stranger"  of  "The  Man  That  Corrupted  Had- 
leyburg,"  Mark  Twain  frankly  images  himself.  But  he 
does  so,  we  perceive,  only  by  taking  cover  behind  a 
device  that  enables  him  to  save  his  face  and  make  good 
his  retreat.  Pudd'nhead  is  only  a  crack-brained  fool 
about  things  in  general,  even  if  he  is  pretty  clever  with 
his  finger-print  invention — otherwise  he  would  find 
something  better  to  do  than  to  spend  his  time  writing 
nonsense;  and  as  for  Lord  Berkeley,  how  could  you 
expect  a  young  English  snob  to  know  anything  about 
democracy?  That  was  the  reaction  upon  which  Mark 
Twain  could  safely  count  in  his  readers;  they  would 
only  be  fooling  themselves,  of  course,  they  would  know 
that  they  were  fooling  themselves :  but  in  order  to  keep 
up  the  great  American  game  of  bluff  they  would  have  to 
forgive  him!  As  long  as  he  never  hit  below  the  belt  by 
speaking  in  his  own  person,  in  short,  he  was  perfectly 
secure.  And  Mark  Twain,  the  humorist,  who  held  the 
public  in  the  hollow  of  his  hand,  knew  it. 

It  is  only  after  some  such  explanation  as  this  that 
we  can  understand  the  supremacy  among  all  Mark 
Twain's  writings  of  " Huckleberry  Finn."  Through 
the  character  of  Huck,  that  disreputable,  illiterate  little 


Those  Extraordinary  Twins      195 

boy,  as  Mrs.  Clemens  no  doubt  thought  him,  he  was 
licensed  to  let  himself  go.  "We  have  seen  how  indifferent 
his  sponsors  were  to  the  writing  and  the  fate  of  this 
book :  ' '  nobody, ' '  says  Mr.  Paine,  ' '  appears  to  have  been 
especially  concerned  about  Huck,  except,  possibly,  the 
publisher."  The  more  indifferent  they  were,  the  freer 
was  Mark  Twain!  Anything  that  little  vagabond  said 
might  be  safely  trusted  to  pass  the  censor,  just  because 
he  was  a  little  vagabond,  just  because,  as  an  irresponsi- 
ble boy,  he  could  not,  in  the  eyes  of  the  mighty  ones 
of  this  world,  know  anything  in  any  case  about  life, 
morals  and  civilization.  That  Mark  Twain  was  almost, 
if  not  quite,  conscious  of  his  opportunity  we  can  see 
from  his  introductory  note  to  the  book:  "Persons  at- 
tempting to  find  a  motive  in  this  narrative  will  be  prose- 
cuted; persons  attempting  to  find  a  moral  in  it  will  be 
banished;  persons  attempting  to  find  a  plot  in  it  will 
be  shot."  He  feels  so  secure  of  himself  that  he  can 
actually  challenge  the  censor  to  accuse  him  of  having 
a  motive!  Iluck's  illiteracy,  Huck's  disreputableness 
and  general  outrageousness  are  so  many  shields  behind 
which  Mark  Twain  can  let  all  the  cats  out  of  the  bag 
with  impunity.  He  must,  I  say,  have  had  a  certain 
sense  of  his  unusual  security  when  he  wrote  some  of  the 
more  cynically  satirical  passages  of  the  book,  when  he 
permitted  Colonel  Sherburn  to  taunt  the  mob,  when  he 
drew  that  picture  of  the  audience  who  had  been  taken 
in  by  the  Duke  proceeding  to  sell  the  rest  of  their 
townspeople,  when  he  has  the  King  put  up  the  notice, 
"Ladies  and  Children  not  Admitted,"  and  add:  "There, 
if  that  line  don't  fetch  them,  I  don't  know  Arkansaw!" 
The  withering  contempt  for  humankind  expressed  in 
these  episodes  was  of  the  sort  that  Mark  Twain  ex- 
pressed more  and  more  openly,  as  time  went  on,  in  his 
own  person;  but  he  was  not  indulging  in  that  costly 
kind  of  cynicism  in  the  days  when  he  wrote  ''Huckle- 
berry Finn."  He  must,  therefore,  have  appreciated  the 


CHAPTER  IX 

MARK  TWAIN'S  HUMOR 

"To  be  good  is  noble;  but  to  show  others  how  to  be  good  is 
nobler  and  less  trouble." 

Pudd'rihead  Wilson's  New  Calendar. 

AND  now  we  are  ready  for  Mark  Twain's  humor. 
"We  recall  how   reluctant   Mark   Twain   was   to 
adopt  the  humorist's  career  and  how,  all  his  life,  he  was 
in  revolt  against  a  role  which,  as  he  vaguely  felt,  had 
been  thrust  upon  him:  that  he  considered  it  necessary 
to  publish  his  "Joan  of  Arc"  anonymously  is  only  one 
of  many  proofs  of  a  lifelong  sense  that  Mark  Twain 
jgffls  an  unworthy  double  of  Samuel  Langhorne  Clemens. 
(His  humorous  writing  he  regarded  as  something  ex- 
l  ternal  to  himself,  as  something  other  than  artistic  self- 
\  expression ;  and  it  was  in  consequence  of  pursuing  it, 
I  we  have  divined,  that  he  was  arrested  in  his  moral 
umd  esthetic  development.    We  have  seen,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  he  adopted  this  career  because  his  humor 
was  the  only  writing  he   did  in  Nevada   that  found 
an    appreciative    audience    and    that    the    immediate 
result  of  his  decision  was  that  he  obtained  from  the 
American   public   the   prodigious   and   permanent   ap- 
proval which  his  own  craving  for  success  and  prestige 
had  driven   him  to  seek.     Here,   then,   are   the   facts 
our  discussion  of  Mark  Twain's  humor  will  have  to 
explain.    We  must  see  what  that  humor  was,  and  what 
produced  it,  and  why  in  following  it  he  violated  his 
own  nature  and  at  the  same  time  achieved  such  ample 
material  rewards. 

198 


Mark  Twain's  Humor          199 

It  was  in  Nevada  and  California  that  Mark  Twain's 
humor,  of  which  we  have  evidences  during  the  whole 
of  his  adolescence,  came  to  the  front;  and  it  is  a  nota- 
ble fact  that  almost  every  man  of  a  literary  tendency 
who  was  brought  into  contact  with  those  pioneer  condi- 
tions became  a  humorist,  ^he  "funny  man"  was  one 
of  the  outstanding  pioneer  types;  he  was,  indeed,  vir- 
tually the  sole  representative  of  the  Republic  of  Letters 
in  the  old  West.  Artemus  Ward,  Orpheus  C.  Ker, 
Petroleum  V.  Nasby,  Dan  de  Quille,  Captain  Jack 
Downing^  even  Bret  Harte,  sufficiently  remind  us  of 
this  fact  j  Plainly,  pioneer  life  had  a  sort  of  chemical 
effect  on  the  creative  mind,  instantly  giving  it  a  humor- 
ous cast.  Plainly,  also,  the  humorist  was  a  type  that 
pioneer  society  required  in  order  to  maintain  its  psychic 
equilibrium.  Mr.  Paine  seems  to  have  divined  this  in 
his  description  of  Western  humor.  "It  is  a  distinct 
product,"  he  says.  "It  grew  out  of  a  distinct  condi- 
tion—the battle  with  the  frontier.  The  fight  was  so 
desperate,  to  take  it  seriously  was  to  surrender. 
Women  laughed  that  they  might  not  weep;  men,  when 
they  could  no  longer  swear.  'Western  humor'  was  the 
result.  It  is  the  freshest,  wildest  humor  in  the  world, 
but  there  is  tragedy  behind  it." 

Perhaps  we  can  best  surprise  the  secret  of  this  humor 
by  noting  Mark  Twain's  instinctive  reaction  to  the  life 
in  Nevada.  It  is  evident  that  in  many  ways,  and  in 
spite  of  his  high  spirits  and  high  hopes,  he  found  that 
life  profoundly  repugnant  to  him:  he  constantly  con- 
fesses in  his  diary  and  letters,  indeed,  to  the  misery 
it  involves.  "I  do  hate  to  go  back  to  the  Washoe,"  he 
writes,  after  a  few  weeks  of  respite  from  mining.  "We 
fag  ourselves  completely  out  every  day."  He  describes 
Nevada  as  a  place  where  the  devil  would  feel  home- 
sick: "I  heard  a  gentleman  say,  the  other  day,  that  it 

was  the  'd dest  country  under  the  sun' — and  that 

comprehensive  conception  I  fully  subscribe  to.  It  never 


CHAPTER  IX 

MARK  TWAIN'S  HUMOR 

"To  be  good  is  noble;  but  to  show  others  how  to  be  good  is 
nobler   and   less  trouble." 

Pudd'nhead  Wilson's  New  Calendar. 

AND  now  we  are  ready  for  Mark  Twain's  humor. 
"We  recall  how  reluctant  Mark   Twain   was  to 
adopt  the  humorist's  career  and  how,  all  his  life,  he  was 
in  revolt  against  a  role  which,  as  he  vaguely  felt,  had 
been  thrust  upon  him:  that  he  considered  it  necessary 
to  publish  his  "Joan  of  Arc"  anonymously  is  only  one 
of  many  proofs  of  a  lifelong  sense  that  Mark  Twain 
-^fls  an  unworthy  double  of  Samuel  Langhorne  Clemens. 
{  His  humorous  writing  he  regarded  as  something  ex- 
I  ternal  to  himself,  as  something  other  than  artistic  self- 
\  expression ;  and  it  was  in  consequence  of  pursuing  it, 
j  we  have  divined,  that  he  was  arrested  in  his  moral 
Uua4  esthetic  development.    We  have  seen,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  he  adopted  this  career  because  his  humor 
was  the  only  writing  he   did  in  Nevada  that  found 
an    appreciative    audience    and    that    the    immediate 
result  of  his  decision  was  that  he  obtained  from  the 
American    public    the   prodigious   and   permanent   ap- 
proval which  his  own  craving  for  success  and  prestige 
had   driven   him  to  seek.     Here,   then,   are   the   facts 
our  discussion  of  Mark  Twain's  humor  will  have  to 
explain.    We  must  see  what  that  humor  was,  and  what 
produced  it,  and  why  in  following  it  he  violated  his 
own  nature  and  at  the  same  time  achieved  such  ample 
material  rewards. 

198 


Mark  Twain's  Humor          199 

It  was  in  Nevada  and  California  that  Mark  Twain's 
humor,  of  which  we  have  evidences  during  the  whole 
of  his  adolescence,  came  to  the  front ;  and  it  is  a  nota- 
ble fact  that  almost  every  man  of  a  literary  tendency 
who  was  brought  into  contact  with  those  pioneer  condi- 
tions became  a  humorist.  \^he  "funny  man"  was  one 
of  the  outstanding  pioneer  types;  he  was,  indeed,  vir- 
tually the  sole  representative  of  the  Republic  of  Letters 
in  the  old  West.  Artemus  Ward,  Orpheus  C.  Ker, 
Petroleum  V.  Nasby,  Dan  de  Quille,  Captain  Jack 
Downing  even  Bret  Harte,  sufficiently  remind  us  of 
this  fact!  Plainly,  pioneer  life  had  a  sort  of  chemical 
effect  on  me  creative  mind,  instantly  giving  it  a  humor- 
ous cast.  Plainly,  also,  the  humorist  was  a  type  that 
pioneer  society  required  in  order  to  maintain  its  psychic 
equilibrium.  Mr.  Paine  seems  to  have  divined  this  in 
his  description  of  Western  humor.  "It  is  a  distinct 
product,"  he  says.  "It  grew  out  of  a  distinct  condi- 
tion— the  battle  with  the  frontier.  The  fight  was  so 
desperate,  to  take  it  seriously  was  to  surrender. 
Women  laughed  that  they  might  not  weep ;  men,  when 
they  could  no  longer  swear.  'Western  humor'  was  the 
result.  It  is  the  freshest,  wildest  humor  in  the  world, 
but  there  is  tragedy  behind  it." 

Perhaps  we  can  best  surprise  the  secret  of  this  humor 
by  noting  Mark  Twain's  instinctive  reaction  to  the  life 
in  Nevada.  It  is  evident  that  in  many  ways,  and  in 
spite  of  his  high  spirits  and  high  hopes,  he  found  that 
life  profoundly  repugnant  to  him:  he  constantly  con- 
fesses in  his  diary  and  letters,  indeed,  to  the  misery 
it  involves.  "I  do  hate  to  go  back  to  the  Washoe,"  he 
writes,  after  a  few  weeks  of  respite  from  mining.  "We 
fag  ourselves  completely  out  every  day."  He  describes 
Nevada  as  a  place  where  the  devil  would  feel  home- 
sick: "I  heard  a  gentleman  say,  the  other  day,  that  it 

was  the  'd dest  country  under  the  sun' — and  that 

comprehensive  conception  I  fully  subscribe  to.  It  never 


200    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

rains  here,  and  the  dew  never  falls.  No  flowers  grow 
here,  and  no  green  thing  gladdens  the  eye.  .  .  .  Our  city 
lies  in  the  midst  of  a  desert  of  the  purest — most  un- 
adulterated and  uncompromising — sand."  And  as  with 
the  setting — so  with  the  life.  "High-strung  and  neu- 
rotic," says  Mr.  Paine,  ''the  strain  of  newspaper  work 
and  the  tumult  of  the  Comstock  had  told  on  him":  more 
than  once  he  found  it  necessary — this  young  man  of 
twenty-eight — "to  drop  all  work  and  rest  for  a  time  at 
Steamboat  Springs,  a  place  near  Virginia  City,  where 
there  were  boiling  springs  and  steaming  fissures  in  the 
mountain-side,  and  a  comfortable  hotel."  That  he 
found  the  pace  in  California  just  as  difficult  we  have  his 
own  testimony;  with  what  fervor  he  speaks  of  the 

"d n  San  Francisco  style  of  wearing  out  life,"  the 

"careworn  or  eager,  anxious  faces"  that  made  his  brief 
escape  to  the  Sandwich  Islands — "God,  what  a  contrast 
with  California  and  the  Washoe"! — ever  sweet  and 
blessed  in  his  memory.  Never,  in  short,  was  a  man  more 
rasped  by  any  social  situation  than  was  this  young 
"barbarian,"  as  people  have  called  him,  by  what  people 
also  call  the  free  life  of  the  West.  We  can  see  this  in 
his  profanity,  which  also,  like  his  humor,  came  to  the 
front  in  Nevada  and  remained  one  of  his  prominent 
characteristics  through  life.  We  remember  how  "mad" 
he  was,  "clear  through,"  over  the  famous  highway  rob- 
bery episode :  he  was  always  half -seriously  threatening 
to  kill  people ;  he  threatened  to  kill  his  best  friend,  Jim 
Gillis.  "To  hear  him  denounce  a  thing,"  says  Mr. 
Paine,  "was  to  give  one  the  fierce,  searching  delight 
of  galvanic  waves";  naturally,  therefore,  no  one  in  Vir- 
ginia, according  to  one  of  the  Gillis  brothers,  could  "re- 
sist the  temptation  of  making  Sam  swear. ' '  Naturally ; 
but  from  all  this  we  observe  that  Mark  Twain  was  liv- 
ing in  a  state  of  chronic  nervous  exasperation. 

Was  this  not  due  to  the  extraordinary  number  of  re- 
pressions the  life  of  pioneering  involved?     It  is  true 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         201 

that  it  was,  in  one  sense,  a  free  life.  It  was  an  irre- 
sponsible life,  it  implied  a  break  with  civilization,  with 
domestic,  religious  and  political  ties.  Nothing  could  be 
freer  in  that  sense  than  the  society  of  the  gold-seekers  in 
Nevada  and  California  as  we  find  it  pictured  in  ' '  Rough- 
ing It. ' '  Free  as  that  society  was,  nevertheless,  scarcely 
any  normal  instinct  could  have  been  expressed  or  satis- 
fied in  it.  The  pioneers  were  not  primitive  men,  they 
were  civilized  men,  often  of  gentle  birth  and  education, 
men  for  v/hoin  civilization  had  implied  many  restraints, 
of  course,  but  innumerable  avenues  also  of  social  and 
personal  expression  and  activity  to  which  their  natures 
were  accustomed.  In  escaping  responsibility,  therefore, 
they  had  only  placed  themselves  in  a  position  where 
their  instincts  were  blocked  on  every  side.  There  were 
so  few  women  among  them,  for  instance,  that  their 
sexual  lives  were  either  starved  or  debased;  and  chil- 
dren were  as  rare  as  the  "Luck"  of  Roaring  Camp, 
a  story  that  shows  how  hysterical,  in  consequence  of 
these  and  similar  conditions,  the  mining  population 
was.  Those  who  were  accustomed  to  the  exercise  of 
complex  tastes  and  preferences  found  themselves 
obliged  to  conform  to  a  single  monotonous  routine. 
There  were  criminal  elements  among  them,  too,  which 
kept  them  continually  on  their  guard,  and  at  best  they 
were  so  diverse  in  origin  that  any  real  community  of 
feeling  among  them  was  virtually  impossible.  In  be- 
coming pioneers  they  had,  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  to  accept 
a  common  mold;  they  were  obliged  to  abdicate  their 
individuality,  to  conceal  their  differences  and  their 
personal  pretensions  under  the  mask  of  a  rough  good- 
fellowship  that  found  expression  mainly  in  the  ner- 
vously and  emotionally  devastating  terms  of  the  saloon, 
the  brothel  and  the  gambling-hell.  Mark  Twain  has 
described  for  us  the  "gallant  host"  which  peopled  this 
hectic  scene,  that  army  of  "erect,  bright-eyed,  quick- 
moving,  strong-handed  young  giants — the  very  pick 


2O2     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

and  choice  of  the  world's  glorious  ones."  Where  are 
they  now?  he  asks  in  "Koughing  It."  "Scattered  to 
the  ends  of  the  earth,  or  prematurely  aged  or  decrepit 
— or  shot  or  stabbed  in  street  affrays — or  dead  of  dis- 
appointed hopes  and  broken  hearts — all  gone,  or  nearly 
all,  victims  devoted  upon  the  altar  of  the  golden  calf." 
We  could  not  have  a  more  conclusive  proof  of  the  total 
atrophy  of  human  nature  this  old  Nevada  life  entailed. 

Innumerable  repressions,  I  say,  produced  the  fierce 
intensity  of  that  life,  which  burnt  itself  out  so  quickly. 
We  can  see  this,  indeed,  in  the  fact  that  it  was  marked 
by  an  incessant  series  of  eruptions.  The  gold-seekers 
had  come  of  their  own  volition,  they  had  to  maintain 
an  outward  equilibrium,  they  were  sworn,  as  it  were, 
to  a  conspiracy  of  masculine  silence  regarding  these  re- 
pressions, of  which,  in  fact,  in  the  intensity  of  their 
mania,  they  were  scarcely  aware.  Nevertheless,  the 
human  organism  will  not  submit  to  such  conditions 
without  registering  one  protest  after  another;  accord- 
ingly, we  find  that  in  the  mining^camps  the  practical 
joke  was,  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "legal  tender,"  profanity 
was  almost  the  normal  language,  and  murder  was  com- 
mitted at  all  hours  of  the  day  and  night.  Mark  Twain 
tells  how,  in  Virginia  City,  murders  were  so  common 
that  they  were  scarcely  worth  more  than  a  line  or  two 
in  the  newspaper,  and  ' '  almost  every  man ' '  in  the  town, 
according  to  one  of  his  old  friends,  "had  fought  with 
pistols  either  impromptu  or  premeditated  duels."  We 
have  just  noted  that  for  Mark  Twain  this  life  was  a 
life  of  chronic  nervous  exasperation.  Can  we  not  say 
now  that,  in  a  lesser  degree,  it  was  a  life  of  chronic 
nervous  exasperation  for  all  the  pioneers? 

But  why?  What  do  we  mean  when  we  speak  of  re- 
pressions ?  We  mean  that  individuality,  the  whole  com- 
plex of  personal  desires,  tastes  and  preferences,  is  in- 
hibited from  expressing  itself,  from  registering  itself. 
The  situation  of  the  pioneers  was  an  impossible  one, 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         203 

but,  victims  as  they  were  of  their  own  thirst  for  gold, 
they  could  not  withdraw  from  it;  and  their  masculine 
pride  prevented  them  even  from  openly  complaining 
or  criticising  it.  In  this  respect,  as  I  have  already 
pointed  out,  their  position  was  precisely  parallel  to 
that  of  soldiers  in  the  trenches.  And,  like  the  soldiers 
in  the  trenches,  they  were  always  on  the  verge  of  laugh- 
ter, which  philosophers  generally  agree  in  calling  a  re- 
lief from  restraint. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  understand  why  all  the 
writers  who  were  subjected  to  these  conditions  became 
humorists.  The  creative  mind  is  the  most  sensitive 
mind,  the  most  highly  individualized,  the  most  compli- 
cated in  its  range  of  desires:  consequently,  in  circum- 
stances where  individuality  cannot  register  itself,  it 
undergoes  the  most  general  and  the  most  painful  repres- 
sion. The  more  imaginative  a  man  was  the  more  he 
would  naturally  feel  himself  restrained  and  chafed  by 
such  a  life  as  that  of  the  gold-seekers.  He,  like  his 
comrades,  was  under  the  necessity  of  making  money, 
of  succeeding — the  same  impulse  had  brought  him  there 
that  had  brought  every  one  else ;  we  know  how  deeply 
Mark  Twain  was  under  this  obligation,  an  obligation 
that  prevented  him  from  attempting  to  pursue  the 
artistic  life  directly  because  it  was  despised  and  be- 
cause to  have  done  so  would  have  required  just  those 
expressions  of  individuality  that  pioneer  life  rendered 
impossible.  On  the  other  hand,  sensitive  as  he  was,  he 
instinctively  recoiled  from  violence  of  all  kinds  and 
was  thus  inhibited  by  his  own  nature  from  obtaining 
those  outlets  in  "practical  jokes,"  impromptu  duels 
and  murder  to  which  his  companions  constantly  re- 
sorted. Mr.  Paine  tells  us  that  Mark  Twain  never 
"cared  for"  duels  and  "discouraged"  them,  and  that 
he  "seldom  indulged  physically"  in  practical  jokes.  In 
point  of  fact,  he  abhorred  them.  "When  grown-up 
'people  indulge  in  practical  jokes,"  he  wrote,  forty  years 


204    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

later,  in  his  Autobiography,  "the  fact  gauges  them. 
They  have  lived  narrow,  obscure  and  ignorant  lives, 
and  at  full  manhood  they  still  retain  and  cherish  a 
job-lot  of  left-over  standards  and  ideals  that  would 
have  been  discarded  with  their  boyhood  if  they  had 
then  moved  out  into  the  world  and  a  broader  life. 
There  were  many  practical  jokers  in  the  new  Terri- 
tory." After  all  those  years  he  had  not  outgrown  his 
instinctive  resentment  against  the  assaults  to  which  his 
dignity  had  had  to  submit!  To  Mark  Twain,  in  short, 
the  life  of  the  gold-fields  was  a  life  of  almost  infinite 
repression :  the  fact,  as  we  have  seen,  that  he  became  a 
universal  butt  sufficiently  proves  how  large  an  area  of 
individuality  as  it  were  had  to  submit  to  the  censorship 
of  public  opinion  if  he  was  to  fulfill  his  pledge  and 
"make  good"  in  Nevada. 

Sere  we  have   the   psychogenesis  of  Mark  Twain's 

'  humor.  An  outlet  of  some  kind  that  prodigious  energy 
of  his  was  bound  to  have,  and  this  outlet,  since  he  had 
been  unable  to  throw  himself  whole-heartedly  into  min- 
ing, had  to  be  one  which,  in  some  way,  however 
obliquely,  expressed  the  artist  in  him.  That  expression, 

]  nevertheless,  had  also  to  be  one  which,  far  from  outrag- 
ing public  opinion,  would  win  its  emphatic  approval. 
Mark  Twain  was  obliged  to  remain  a  ''good  fellow" 
in  order  to  succeed,  in  order  to  satisfy  his  inordinate 
will-to-power;  and  we  have  seen  how  he  acquiesced  in 
the  suppression  of  all  those  manifestations  of  his  in- 
dividuality— his  natural  freedom  of  sentiment,  his  love 
of  reading,  his  constant  desire  for  privacy — that  struck 
his  comrades  as  "different"  or  "superior."  His  choice 
of  a  pen-name,  as  we  have  noticed,  proves  how  urgently 
he  felt  the  need  of  a  "protective  coloration"  in  this 
society  where  the  writer  was  a  despised  type.  Too  sen- 
sitive to  relieve  himself  by  horseplay,  he  had  what  one 
might  call  a  preliminary  recourse  in  his  profanity,  those 
"scorching,  singeing  blasts"  he  was  always  directing 


Mark  Twain's  Humor          205 

at  his  companions,  and  that  this  in  a  measure  appeased 
him  we  can  see  from  Mr.  Paine 's  remark  that  his  pro- 
fanity seemed  "the  safety-valve  of  his  high-pressure 
intellectual  engine.  .  .  .  When  he  had  blown  off  he  was 
always  calm,  gentle,  forgiving  and  even  tender."  We 
can  best  see  his  humor,  then,  precisely  as  Mr.  Paine 
seems  to  see  it  in  the  phrase,  "Men  laughed  when  they 
could  no  longer  swear" — as  the  expression,  in  short,  of 
a  psychic  stage  one  step  beyond  the  stage  where  he  could 
find  relief  in  swearing,  as  a  harmless  "moral  equiva- 
lent," in  other  words,  of  those  acts  of  violence  which 
his  own  sensitiveness  and  his  fear  of  consequences  alike 
prevented  him  from  committing.  By  means  of  ferocious 
jokes — and  most  of  Mark  Twain's  early  jokes  are  of  a 
ferocity  that  will  hardly  be  believed  by  any  one  who 
has  not  examined  them  critically — he  could  vent  his 
hatred  of  pioneer  life  and  all  its  conditions,  those  con- 
ditions that  were  thwarting  his  creative  life;  he  could, 
in  this  vicarious  manner,  appease  the  artist  in  him, 
while  at  the  same  time  keeping  on  the  safe  side  of  public 
opinion,  the  very  act  of  transforming  his  aggressions 
into  jokes  rendering  them  innocuous.  And  what  made 
it  a  relief  to  him  made  it  also  popular.  According  to 
Freud,  whose  investigations  in  this  field  are  perhaps 
the  most  enlightening  we  have,  the  pleasurable  effect 
of  humor  consists  in  affording  "an  economy  of  expen- 
diture in  feeling."  It  requires  an  infinitely  smaller 
psychic  effort  to  expel  one's  spleen  in  a  verbal  joke, 
than  in  a  practical  joke  or  a  murder,  the  common 
method  among  the  pioneers,  and  it  is  infinitely  safer, 
too! — a  fact  that  instantly  explains  the  function  of  the 
humorist  in  pioneer  society  and  the  immense  success  of 
Mark  Twain.  By  means  of  those  jokes  of  his — ("men 
were  killed  every  week,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  of  one  little 
contest  of  wit  in  which  he  engaged,  "for  milder  things 
than  the  editors  had  spoken  each  of  the  other") — his 
comrades  were  able,  without  transgressing  the  law  and 


2o6     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  conventions,  to  vent  their  own  exasperation  with  the 
conditions  of  their  life  and  all  the  mutual  hatred  and 
the  destructive  desires  buried  under  the  attitude  of 
good-fellowship  that  was  imposed  by  the  exigencies  of 
their  work.  As  for  Mark  Twain  himself,  the  protec- 
tive 'coloration,  that  had  originally  enabled  him  to 
maintain  his  standing  in  pioneer  society  ended  by  giv- 
ing him  the  position  which  he  craved,  the  position  of  an 
acknowledged  leader. 

For,  as  I  have  said,  Mark  Twain's  early  humor  was 
of  a  singular  ferocity.  The  very  titles  of  his  Western 
sketches  reveal  their  general  character:  "The  Dutch 
Nick  Massacre,"  "A  New  Crime,"  "Lionizing  Mur- 
derers," "The  Killing  of  Julius  Cagsar  'Localized'," 
"Cannibalism  in  the  Cars";  he  is  obsessed  with  the  fig- 
ure of  the  undertaker  and  his  labors,  and  it  would  be 
a  worthy  task  for  some  zealous  aspirant  for  the  doc- 
tor's degree  to  enumerate  the  occasions  when  Mark 
Twain  uses  the  phrase  "I  brained  him  on  the  spot" 
or  some  equivalent.  "If  the  desire  to  kill  and  the  op- 
portunity to  kill  came  always  together,"  says  Pudd'n- 
head  Wilson,  expressing  Mark  Twain's  own  frequent 
mood,  "who  would  escape  hanging?"  His  early  humor, 
in  short,  was  almost  wholly  aggressive.  "It  began  with 
a  series  of  hoaxes,  "usually  intended,"  says  Mr.  Paine, 
"as  a  special  punishment  of  some  particular  individual 
or  paper  or  locality;  but  victims  were  gathered  whole- 
sale in  their  seductive  web."  He  was  "unsparing  in  his 
ridicule  of  the  Governor,  4he  officials  in  general,  the 
legislative  members,  and  of  individual  citizens."  He 
became  known,  in  fact,  as  "a  sort  of  general  censor," 
and  the  officials,  the  corrupt  officials — we  gather  that 
they  were  all  corrupt,  except  his  own  painfully  honest 
brother  Orion — were  frankly  afraid  of  him.  "He  was 
very  far,"  said  one  of  his  later  friends,  "from  being  one 
who  tried  in  any  way  to  make  himself  popular."  To  be 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         207 

sure  he  was!    He  was  very  far  even  from  trying  to  be 
a  humorist! 

Do  we  not  recall  the  early  youth  of  that  most  un- 
humorous  soul  Henrik  Ibsen,  who,  as  an  apothecary's 
apprentice  in  a  little  provincial  town,  found  it  impos- 
sible, as  he  wrote  afterward,  "to  give  expression  to  all 
that  fermented  in  me  except  by  mad,  riotous  pranks, 
which  brought  down  upon  me  the  ill-will  of  all  the  re- 
spectable citizens,  who  could  not  enter  into  that  world 
which  I  was  wrestling  with  alone"?  Any  young  man 
with  a  highly  developed  individuality  would  have  re- 
acted in  the  same  way;  Mark  Twain  had  committed 
the  same  "mad,  riotous  pranks"  in  his  own  childhood, 
and  with  the  same  effect  upon  the  respectable  citizens 
of  Hannibal:  if  he  had  been  as  conscious  as  Ibsen  and 
had  not  been  obliged  by  that  old  pledge  to  his  mother 
to  make  terms  with  his  environment,  his  antagonism 
would  have  ultimately  taken  the  form,  not  of  humor, 
but  of  satire  also.  For  it  began  as  satire.  He  had 
the  courage  of  the  kindest  of  hearts,  the  humanest  of 
souls:  to  that  extent  the  poet  was  awake  in  him.  His 
attacks  on  corrupt  officials  were  no  more  vehement  than 
his  pleas  on  behalf  of  the  despised  Chinese,  who  were 
cuffed  and  maltreated  and  swindled  by  the  Californians. 
In  these  attacks  and  these  pleas  alike  he  was  venting 
the  humane  desires  of  the  pioneers  themselves:  that  is 
the  secret  of  his  "daily  philippics."  San  Francisco 
was  "weltering  in  corruption"  and  the  settlers  instinct- 
ively loathed  this  condition  of  things  almost  as  much 
as  did  Mark  Twain  himself.  They  could  not  seriously 
undertake  to  reform  it,  however,  because  this  corrup- 
tion was  an  inevitable  part  of  a  social  situation  that 
made  their  own  adventure,  their  own  success  as  gam- 
bling miners,  possible.  The  desire  to  change  things,  to 
reform  things  was  checked  in  the  individual  by  a 
counter-desire  for  unlimited  material  success  that 


208     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

throve  on  the  very  moral  and  political  disorder  against 
which  all  but  his  acquisitive  instincts  rebelled.  In  short, 
had  Mark  Twain  been  permitted  too  long  to  express  his 
indignation  directly  in  the  form  of  satire,  it  would  have 
led  sooner  or  later  to  a  reorientation  of  society  that 
would  have  put  an  end  to  the  conditions  under  which 
the  miners  flourished,  not  indeed  as  human  beings,  but 
as  seekers  of  wealth.  Consequently,  while  they  admired 
Mark  Twain's  vehemence  and  felt  themselves  relieved 
through  it — a  relief  they  expressed  in  their  "storms  of 
laughter  and  applause,"  they  could  not,  beyond  a  cer- 
tain point,  permit  it.  Mark  Twain,  as  we  know,  had 
been  compelled  to  leave  Nevada  to  escape  the  legal  con- 
sequences of  a  duel.  He  had  gone  to  San  Francisco, 
where  he  had  immediately  engaged  in  such  a  campaign 
of  "muck-raking"  that  the  officials  "found  means,"  as 
Mr.  Paine  says,  "of  making  the  writer's  life  there  diffi- 
cult and  comfortless."^  As  a  matter  of  fact,  "only  one 
of  the  several  severe  articles  he  wrote  criticising  offi- 
cials and  institutions  seems  to  have  appeared,"  the  re- 
sult being  that  he  lost  all  interest  in  his  work  on  the 
San  Francisco  papers.  When,  on  the  other  hand,  he 
wrote  about  San  Francisco  as  a  correspondent  for  his 
paper  in  the  rival  community  in  Nevada,  it  was,  we  are 
told,  "with  all  the  fierceness  of  a  flaming  indignation 
.long  restrained."  His  impulse,  his  desire,  we  see,  was 
[not  that  of  the  "humorist";  it  was  that  of  the  satirist; 
[  but  whether  in  Nevada  or  in  California  he  was  pro- 
hibited, on  pain  of  social  extinction,  from  expressing 
himself  directly  regarding  the  life  about  him.  Satire, 
in  short,  had  become  for  him  as  impossible  as  murder: 
he  was  obliged  to  remain  a  humorist. ' 

In  an  old  pamphlet  about  Mark  Twain  published  in 
the  eighties  I  discover  the  report  of  a  phrenologist, 
one  "Professor  Beall"  of  Cincinnati,  who  found  the 
trait  of  secretiveness  very  strongly  indicated  in  the 
diameter  of  his  head  just  above  the  ears.  Such  testi- 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         209 

mony,  I  suppose,  has  no  value;  but  it  is  surely  signifi- 
cant that  this  gentleman  found  the  same  trait  exhibited 
in  Mark  Twain's  "slow,  guarded  manner  of  speech." 
Perhaps  we  can  understand  now  the  famous  Mark 
Twain  "drawl,"  which  he  had  inherited  indeed,  but 
which  people  say  he  also  cultivated.  Perhaps  we  can 
understand  also  why  it  is  that  half  the  art  of  American 
humor  consists  in  "keeping  one's  face  straight.-"  These 
humorists!  They  don't  know  themselves  how  much 
they  are  concealing;  and  they  would  be  as  surprised  as 
anybody  to  learn  that  they  are  really  social  revolution- 
ists of  a  sort  who  lack  the  courage  to  admit  it. 

Mark  Twain,  once  committed  to  the  pursuit  of  suc- 
cess, was  obliged,  as  I  say,  to  remain  a  humorist 
whether  he  would  or  no.  When  he  went  East  to  carry 
on  his  journalistic  career,  the  publishers  of  The  Galaxy, 
to  which  he  became  a  regular  contributor,  specifically 
asked  him  to  conduct  a  ' '  humorous  department ' ' ;  and 
after  the  success  of  "The  Innocents  Abroad"  his  pub- 
lisher Bliss,  we  find,  "especially  suggested  and  empha- 
sized a  humorous  work — that  is  to  say,  a  work  humor- 
ously inclined."  We  have  already  seen,  in  a  previous 
chapter,  that  whatever  was  true  of  the  pioneer  society 
on  the  Pacific  Slope  was  essentially  true  also  of  the 
rest  of  the  American  population  during  the  Gilded  Age, 
that  the  business  men  of  the  East  were  in  much  the 
same  case  as  the  pioneers  of  the  West.  The  whole 
country,  as  we  know,  was  as  thirsty  for  humor  as  it 
was  for  ice  water:  Mark  Twain's  humor  fulfilled  dur- 
ing its  generation  a  national  demand  as  universal  in 
America  as  the  demand  fulfilled  in  Russia  by  Dostoiev- 
ski,  in  France  by  Victor  Hugo,  in  England  by  Dickens. 
We  have  at  last  begun  to  approach  the  secret  of  this  in- 
teresting fact. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  homogeneity  of  the  American 
people  during  the  Gilded  Age.  Mr.  Howells  has  al- 
ready related  this  to  the  phenomenon  of  Mark  Twain's 


2io    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

humor.  "We  are  doubtless,"  he  says,  "the  most  thor- 
oughly homogeneous  folk  that  ever  existed  as  a  great 
'nation.  In  our  phrase,  we  -have  somehow  all  'been 
there.'  When  [our  humor]  mentions  hash  we  smile 
because  we  have  each  somehow  known  the  cheap  board- 
ing-house or  restaurant;  when  it  alludes  to  putting  up 
stoves  in  the  fall,  each  of  us  feels  the  grime  and  rust 
of  the  pipes  on  his  hands. "  We  smile  because!  In  that 
"because"  we  have  the  whole  story  of  Mark  Twain's 
success.  The  "cheap  boarding-house,"  where  every  one 
has  to  pretend  that  he  loves  all  his  neighbors,  is  the 
scene  of  many  restraints  and  many  irritations ;  and  as 
for  the  grime  and  rust  of  stove-pipes,  that  is  a  sensation 
very  far  from  pleasant.  Sensitive  men,  constrained  by 
love  and  duty  to  indulge  in  these  things,  have  been 
known  more  than  once  to  complain  about  them  and 
even,  if  the  truth  were  known,  to  cry  bloody  murder. 
That  was  Mark  Twain's  habitual  reaction,  as  we  can 
see  from  the  innumerable  sketches  in  which  he  wades 
knee-deep  in  the  blood  of  chambermaids,  barbers, 
lightning-rod  men,  watch-makers  and  other  perpetrators 
of  the  small  harassments  of  life.  Mark  Twain  was  more 
exasperated  by  these  annoyances  of.  everyday  life  than 
most  people  are,  because  he  was  more  sensitive;  but, 
most  people  are  exasperated  by  them  also,  and,  as  Mr. 
Howells  says,  all  the  American  people  of  Mark 
Twain's  time  were  exasperated  by  the  same  annoy- 
ances. They  were  more  civilized  individually,  in  short, 
than  the  primitive  environment  to  which  they  had  to 
submit:  and  Mark  Twain's  humor  gave  them,  face  to 
face  as  they  were  with  these  annoyances,  the  same  re- 
lief it  had  given  the  miners  in  the  West,  afforded  them, 
that  is  to  say,  the  same  "economy  of  expenditure  in 
feeling."  We  "smile  because"  that  humor  shows  us 
that  we  are  all  in  the  same  boat ;  it  relieves  us  from  the 
strain  of  being  unique  and  solitary  sufferers  and  enables 
us  to  murder  our  tormentors  in  our  imaginations  alone, 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         211 

thus  absolving  us  from  the  odious  necessity  of  shedding 
the  blood  our  first  impulse  prompts  us  to  shed.  Mr. 
Howells  says  that  "we  have  somehow  all  'been  there,'  ' 
a  phrase  which  he  qualifies  by  adding  that  the  typical 
American  of  the  last  generation  was  "the  man  who  has 
risen."  The  man  who  has  "risen"  is  the  man  who  has 
become  progressively  aware  of  civilization ;  and  the  de- 
mands of  the  typical  American  of  Mark  Twain's  time, 
the  demands  he  made  upon  his  environment,  had  become, 
pari  passu,  progressively  more  stringent,  while  the  en- 
vironment itself  remained,  perforce,  just  as  barbarous 
and  corrupt  and  unregenerate  and  "annoying"  as 
ever.  But  why  perforce?  Because  it  was  "good  for 
business";  it  was  the  environment  favorable  for  a 
regime  of  commercial  exploitation.  Wasn't  the  "man 
who  has  risen,"  the  typical  American,  himself  a  busi- 
ness man? 

Now,  we  have  already  seen  that  this  process  of  "ris- 
ing in  the  world,"  of  succeeding  in  business,  is  attained 
only  at  the  cost  of  an  all  but  complete  suppression  of 
individuality.  The  social  effect  of  the  stimulation  of 
the  acquisitive  instinct  in  the  individual  is  a  general 
"levelling  down,"  and  this  is  universally  conceded  to 
have  been  characteristic  of  the  epoch  of  industrial 
pioneering.  The  whole  nation  was  practically  prganized 
— by  a  sort  of  common  consent — on  the  plan  of  a  vast 
business  establishment,  under  a  majority  rule  inalter- 
ably  opposed  to  all  the  inequalities  of  differentiation 
and  to  a  moral  and  aesthetic  development  in  the  in- 
dividual that  would  have  retarded  or  compromised  the 
success  of  the  business  regime.  We  can  see,  therefore, 
that  if  Mark  Twain's  humor  was  universally  popular, 
it  was  because  it  contributed  to  the  efficiency  of  this 
business  regime,  because  it  helped  to  maintain  the 
psychic  equilibrium  of  the  business  man  the  country 
over  precisely  as  it  had  at  first  helped  to  maintain  the 
psychic  equilibrium  of  the  Western  pioneer. 


212     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mark  Twain  has  often  been  called 
the  "business  man's  writer."  In  that  humor  of  his,  as 
in  no  other  literature,  the  "strong,  silent  man"  who  is 
the  archtype  of  the  business  world,  sees  an  aid  rather 
than  a  menace  to  his  practical  efficiency.  But  why  does 
he  find  it  an  aid  and  not  a  menace?  Let  us  put  the 
question  the  other  way  and  ask  why,  in  other  forms 
of  literature,  he  finds  a  menace  and  not  an  aid?  The 
acquisitive  and  the  creative  instincts  are,  as  we  know, 
diametrically  opposed,  and,  as  we  also  know,  all  mani- 
festations of  the  creative  spirit  demand,  require,  an  emo- 
tional effort,  a  psychic  cooperation,  on  the  part  of  the 
reader  or  the  spectator.  This  accounts  for  the  business 
man's  proverbial  hatred  of  the  artist,  a  hatred  that  ex- 
presses itself  in  a  contemptuous  desire  to  ' '  shove  him  off 
the  map."  Every  sort  of  spiritual  expansion,  intellec- 
tual interest,  emotional  freedom  implies  a  retardation  of 
the  bysiness  man's  mental  machinery,  a  retardation  of 
the  "strenuous  life,"  the  life  of  pure  action:  conse- 
quently, the  business  man  shuns  everything  that  dis- 
tracts him,  confuses  him,  stimulates  him  to  think  or  to 
feel.  Bad  for  business!  On  the  other  hand,  he  wel- 
comes everything  that  simplifies  his  course,  everything 
that  helps  him  to  cut  short  his  impulses  of  admiration, 
reverence,  sympathy,  everything  that  prevents  his  mind 
from  opening  and  responding  to  the  complications  and 
the  implications  of  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  life. 
And  this  is  precisely  what  Mark  Twain's  humor  does. 
It  is  just  as  "irreverent"  as  the  Boston  Brahmins 
thought — and  especially  irreverent  toward  them ! — when 
they  gave  him  a  seat  below  the  salt:  it  degrades,  "takes 
down,"  punctures,  ridicules  as  pretentious  and  absurd 
everything  of  a  spiritual,  aesthetic  and  intellectual  na- 
ture the  recognition  of  which,  the  participation  in  which, 
would  retard  the  smooth  and  simple  operation  of  the 
.  j business  man's  mind.  Mark  Twain,  as  we  shall  pres- 
'  jently  see,  enables  the  business  man  to  laugh  at  art,  at 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         213 

antiquity,  at  chivalry,  at  beauty  and  return  to  his  desk 
with  an  infinitely  intensified  conceit  in  his  own  worthij 
ness  and  well-being.  That  is  one  aspect  of  his  humoii 
In  another  aspect,  he  releases,  in  a  hundred  murderous 
fantasies  of  which  I  have  mentioned  several,  all  the 
spleen  which  the  business  life,  with  its  repression  of 
individuality,  involves.  Finally,  in  his  books  about 
childhood,  he  enables  the  reader  to  become  "a  boy 
again,  just  for  a  day,"  to  escape  from  the  emotional 
stress  of  maturity  to  a  simpler  and  more  primitive 
moral  plane.  In  all  these  respects,  Mark  Twain's 
humor  affords  that  "economy  of  expenditure  in  feel- 
ing" which,  as  we  now  perceive,  the  business  man  re- 
quires as  much  as  the  pioneer. 

Glance,  now,  at  a  few  examples  of  Mark  Twain's 
humor:  let  us  see  whether  they  corroborate  this  argu- 
ment. 

In  "A  Tramp  Abroad"  Mark  Twain,  at  the  opera 
in  Mannheim,  finds  himself  seated  directly  behind  a 
young  girl: 

How  pretty  she  was,  and  how  sweet  she  was!  I  wished  she 
would  speak.  But  evidently  she  was  absorbed  in  her  own 
thoughts,  her  own  young-girl  dreams,  and  found  a  dearer  pleas- 
ure in  silence.  But  she  was  not  dreaming  sleepy  dreams, — no, 
she  was  awake,  alive,  alert,  she  could  not  sit  still  a  moment.  She 
was  an  enchanting  study.  Her  gown  was  of  a  soft  white  silky 
stuff  that  clung  to  her  round  young  figure  like  a  fish's  skin,  and 
it  was  rippled  over  with  the  gracefullest  little  fringy  films  of 
lace;  she  had  deep,  tender  eyes,  with  long,  curved  lashes;  and 
she  had  peachy  cheeks,  and  a  dimpled  chin,  and  such  a  dear  little 
dewy  rosebud  of  a  mouth;  and  she  was  so  dove-like,  so  pure,  and 
so  gracious,  so  sweet  and  bewitching.  For  long  hours  I  did 
rr:~htily  wish  she  would  speak.  And  at  last  she  did;  the  red 
lips  parted,  and  out  leaped  her  thought, — and  with  such  a  guile- 
less and  pretty  enthusiasm,  too:  "Auntie,  I  just  know  I've  got 
five  hundred  fleas  on  me ! ' ' 

This  bit  of  humor  is  certainly  characteristic  of  its 
author.  What  is  its  tendency,  as  the  psychologists 


214    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

say?  Mark  Twain  has,  one  observes,  all  the  normal 
emotions  of  a  man  confronted  with  a  pretty  girl:  he 
has  them  so  strongly  indeed  that  he  cannot  keep  his 
mind  on  the  "business  in  hand,"  which  happens  to  be 
the  opera.  He  finds  himself  actually,  prevented  as  he 
is  from  expressing  himself  in  any  direct  way,  drifting 
into  a  rhapsody  about  her!  What  does  he  do  then? 
He  suddenly  dashes  a  pailful  o^iue^w_ater  over  this 
beautiful  vision  of  his,  cuts  it  short  by  a  turn  of  the 
mind  so  sharp,  so  vulgar  indeed,  that  the  vision  itself 
evaporates  in  a  sudden  jet  of  acrid;  steam.  That  young 
girl  will  no  longer  disturb  the  reader's  thoughts!  She 
has  vanished  as  utterly  as  a  butterfly  under  a  barrel  of 
quicklime.  Beauty  is  undone  and  trampled  in  the  dust, 
but  the  strong,  silent  business  man  is  enabled  to  return 
to  his  labors  with  a  soul  purified  of  all  troubling 
emotions. 

Another  example,  the  famous  "oesophagus"  hoax  in 
the  opening  paragraph  of  "A  Double-Barrelled  Detec- 
tive Story": 

It  was  a  crisp  and  spicy  morning  in  early  October.  The  lilacs 
and  laburnums,  lit  with  the  glory-fires  of  autumn,  hung  burning 
and  flashing  in  the  upper  air,  a  fairy  bridge  provided  by  kind 
nature  for  the  wingless  wild  things  that  have  their  home  in  the 
tree- tops  and  would  visit  together;  the  larch  and  the  pomegran- 
ate flung  their  purple  and  yellow  flames  in  brilliant  broad 
splashes  along  the  slanting  sweep  of  woodland,  the  sensxious  fra- 
grance of  innumerable  deciduous  flowers  rose  upon  the  swooning 
atmosphere,  far  in  the  empty  sky  a  solitary  oesophagus  slept 
upon  motionless  wing;  everywhere  brooded  stillness,  serenity,  and 
the  peace  of  God. 

We  scarcely  need  Mr.  Paine 's  assurance  that  "the  warm 
light  and  luxury  of  this  paragraph  are  facetious.  The 
careful  reader  will  note  that  its  various  accessories  are 
ridiculously  associated,  and  only  the  most  careless  reader 
will  accept  the  o?sophagus  as  a  bird."  Mark  Twain's 
sole  and  wilful  purpose,  one  observes,  is  to  disturb  the 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         215 

contemplation  of  beauty,  which  requires  an  emotional 
effort,  to  degrade  beauty  and  thus  divert  the  reader's 
feeling  for  it. 

To  degrade  beauty,  to  debase  distinction  and  thus  to 
simplify  the  life  of  the  man  with  an  eye  single  to  the  j 
main  chance — that,  one  would  almost  say,  is  the  general  j 
tendency  of  Mark  Twain's  humor.  In  almost  every  one  / 
of  his  sallies,  as  any  one  can  see  who  examines  them, 
he  burns  the  house  down  in  order  to  roast  his  pig- 
he  destroys,  that  is  to  say,  an  entire  complex  of  legi- 
timate pretensions  for  the  sake  of  puncturing  a  single 
sham.  And,  as  a  rule,  even  the  "shams"  are  not  shams 
at  all;  they  are  manifestations  of  just  that  personal, 
aesthetic  or  moral  distinction  which  any  but  a  bour- 
geois democracy  would  seek  in  every  way  to  cherish. 
Consider,  for  example,  the  value  assailed  in  his  famous 
speech  on  General  Grant  and  his  big  toe.  The  effect  of 
Mark  Twain's  humorous  assault  on  the  dignity  of  Gen- 
eral Grant  was  to  reduce  him  not  to  the  human  but  to 
the  common  level,  to  puncture  the  reluctant  reverence 
of  the  groundlings  for  the  fact  of  moral  elevation  itself ; 
and  the  success  of  that  audacious  venture,  its  success 
even  with  General  Grant,  was  the  final  proof  of  the 
universal  acquiescence  of  a  race  of  pioneers  in  a  demo- 
cratic regime  opposed,  in  the  name  of  business,  to  the 
recognition  of  any  superior  value  in  the  individual: 
what  made  it  possible  was  the  fact  that  Grant  himself 
had  gone  the  way  of  all  flesh  and  become  a  business 
man.  The  supreme  example  of  Mark  Twain's  humor 
in  this  kind  is,  however,  the  "Connecticut  Yankee."  \* 
"It  was  another  of  my  surreptitious  schemes  for  extin- 
guishing knighthood  by  making  it  grotesque  and  ab- 
surd, ' '  says  the  Yankee.  ' '  Sir  Ozana  's  saddle  was  hung 
about  with  leather  hat-boxes,  and  every  time  he  over- 
came a  wandering  knight  he  swore  him  into  my  service 
and  fitted  him  with  a  plug  and  made  him  wear  it." 
Mark  Twain's  contemporaries,  Mr.  Howells  among  them, 


216    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

liked  to  imagine  that  in  this  fashion  he  was  exposing 
shams  and  pretensions ;  but  unhappily  for  this  argument 
knighthood  had  been  long  extinct  when  Mark  Twain 
undertook  his  doughty  attack  upon  it,  and  it  had  no 
unworthy  modern  equivalent.  To  exalt  the  plug  above 
the  plume  was  a  very  easy  conquest  for  our  humorist; 
it  was  for  this  reason,  and  not,  as  Mark  Twain  imag- 
ined, from  any  snobbish  self-sufficiency,  that  the  Eng- 
lish public  failed  to  be  abashed  by  the  book.  In  this 
respect,  at  least,  the  "Connecticut  Yankee"  was  an  as- 
sault, not  upon  a  social  institution,  but  upon  the  princi- 
ple of  beauty  itself,  an  assault,  moreover,  in  the  very 
name  of  the  shrewd  pioneer  business  man. 

How  easy  it  is  now  to  understand  the  prodigious  suc- 
cess of  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  appearing  as  it  did 
precisely  at  the  psychological  moment,  at  the  close  of 
the  Civil  War,  at  the  opening  of  the  epoch  of  industrial 
pioneering,  in  the  hour  when  the  life  of  business  had 
become  obligatory  upon  every  American  man!  How 
easy  it  is  to  understand  why  it  was  so  generally  used 
as  a  guidebook  by  Americans  traveling  in  Europe !  Set- 
ting out  only  to  ridicule  the  sentimental  pretensions  of 
the  author's  own  pseudo-cultivated  fellow-countrymen, 
it  ridiculed  in  fact  everything  of  which  the  author 's  to- 
tally uncultivated  fellow-countrymen  were  ignorant, 
everything  for  which  they  wished  just  such  an  excuse  to 
be  ignorant  where  knowledge  would  have  contributed 
to  an  individual  development  incompatible  with  suc- 
cess in  business,  a  knowledge  that  would  have  involved 
an  expenditure  in  thought  and  feeling  altogether  too 
costly  for  the  mind  that  was  fixed  upon  the  main  -chance. 
It  attacked  not  only  the  illegitimate  pretensions  of  the 
human  spirit  but  the  legitimate  pretensions  also.  It  ex- 
pressly made  the  American  business  man  as  good  as 
•  Titian  and  a  little  better :  it  made  him  feel  that  art  and 
history  and  all  the  great,  elevated,  admirable,  painful 
discoveries  of  humankind  were  things  not  worth  wast-  , 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         217 

ing  one's  emotions  over.  Oh,  the  Holy  Land,  yes!  But 
the  popular  Biblical  culture  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  notoriously,  as  Matthew  Arnold  pointed  out,  the 
handmaid  of  commercial  philistinism ;  and  besides,  an- 
cient Palestine  was  hardly  a  rival,  in  civilization,  of 
modern  America.  "I  find  your  people — your  best  peo- 
ple, I  suppose  they  are — very  nice,  very  intelligent,  very 
pleasant — only  talk  about  Europe,"  says  a  traveling 
Englishman  in  one  of  Howells's  novels.  "They  talk 
about  London,  and  about  Paris,  and  about  Rome;  there 
seems  to  be  quite  a  passion  for  Italy;  but  they  don't 
seem  interested  in  their  own  country.  I  can't  make  it 
out."  It  was  true,  true  at  least  of  the  colonial  society 
of  New  England;  and  no  doubt  Mark  Twain's  dash  of 
cold  water  had  its  salutary  effect.  The  defiant  Ameri- 
canism of  "The  Innocents  Abroad"  marked,  almost  as 
definitely  as  Whitman 's  ' '  Leaves  of  Grass, ' '  the  opening 
of  the  national  consciousness  of  which  every  one  hopes 
such  great  things  in  the  future.  But,  unlike  "  Leaves 
of  Grass,"  having  served  to  open  it,  it  served  also  to 
postpone  its  fruition.  Its  whole  tendency  ran  precisely 
counter  to  "Whitman's,  in  sterilizing,  that  is  to  say,  in- 
stead of  promoting,  the  creative  impulses  in  the  in- 
dividual. It  buttressed  the  feeble  confidence  of  our 
busy  race  in  a  commercial  civilization  so  little  capable 
of  commanding  the  true  spiritual  allegiance  of  men  that 
they  could  not  help  anxiously  enquiring  every  traveling 
foreigner's  opinion  of  it.  Here  we  have  the  measure 
of  its  influence  both  for  good  and  for  evil.  That  in- 
fluence was  good  in  so  far  as  it  helped  to  concentrate 
the  American  mind  upon  the  problems  and  the  des- 
tinies of  America;  it  was  evil,  and  it  was  mainly  evil, 
in  so  far  as  it  contr  outed  to  a  national  self-complacency, 
to  the  prevailing  satisfaction  of  Americans  with  a  bank- 
er's paradise  in  which,  as  long  as  it  lasts,  the  true  des- 
tinies of  America  will  remain  unfulfilled. 

So  much  for  the  nature  and  the  significance  of  Mark 


218    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Twain's  humor.  I  think  we  can  understand  now  the 
prodigious  practical  success  it  brought  him.  And  are 
we  not  already  in  a  position  to  see  why  the  role  of 
humorist  was  foreign  to  his  nature,  why  he  was  reluc- 
tant to  adopt  it,  why  he  always  rebelled  against  it,  and 
why  it  arrested  his  own  development? 

Obviously,  in  Mark  Twain,  the  making  of  the  humor- 
ist was  the  undoing  of  the  artist.  It  meant  the  sup- 
pression of  his  aesthetic  desires,  the  degradation  of 
everything  upon  which  the  creative  instinct  feeds.  How 
can  a  man  everlastingly  check  his  natural  impulses  with- 
out in  the  end  becoming  the  victim  of  his  own  habit? 

I  have  spoken  of  the  "Connecticut  Yankee."  We 
know  how  Mark  Twain  loved  the  tales  of  Sir  Thomas 
Malory:  they  were  to  him  a  lifelong  passion  and  de- 
light. As  for  " knightly  trappings,"  he  adored  them: 
think  of  his  love  for  gorgeous  costumes,  of  the  pleasure 
he  found  in  dressing  up  for  charades,  of  the  affection 
with  which  he  wrote  "The  Prince  and  the  Pauper"! 
When,  therefore,  in  his  valiant  endeavor  to  "extin- 
guish knighthood,"  he  sends  Sir  Ozana  about  the  coun- 
try laying  violent  hands  on  wandering  knights  and  clap- 
ping plug-hats  on  their  heads  he  is  doing  something 
very  agreeable,  indeed,  to  the  complacent  American 
business  man,  agreeable  to  the  business  man  in  himself, 
but  in  absolute  violation  of  his  own  spirit.  That  is  why 
his  taste  remained  infantile,  why  he  continued  to  adore 
"knightly  trappings"  instead  of  developing  to  a  more 
advanced  aesthetic  stage.  His  feelings  for  Malory,  we  are 
told,  was  one  of  "reverence":  the  reverence  which  he 
felt  was  the  complement  of  the  irreverence  with  which 
he  acted.  One  cannot  degrade  the  undegradeable :  one 
can  actually  degrade  only  oneself,  and  the  result  of  per- 
petually "taking  things  down"  is  that  one  remains 
"down"  oneself,  and  beauty  becomes  more  and  more 
inaccessibly  "up."  That  is  why,  in  the  presence  of 
art,  Mark  Twain  always  felt,  as  he  said,  "like  a  bar- 


Mark  Twain's  Humor         219 

beeper  in  heaven."  In  destroying  what  he  was  con- 
strained to  consider  the  false  pretensions  of  others,  he 
destroyed  also  the  legitimate  pretensions  of  his  own  soul. 
Thus  his  humor,  which  had  originally  served  him  as  a 
protective  coloration  against  the  consequences  of  the 
creative  life,  ended  by  stunting  and  thwarting  that 
creative  life  and  leaving  Mark  Twain  himself  a  scarred 
child. 

He  had,  to  the  end,  the  intuition  of  another  sort  of 
humor.  "Will  a  day  come,"  asks  Satan,  in  "The  Mys- 
terious Stranger, "  "  when  the  race  will  detect  the  funni- 
ness  of  these  juvenilities  and  laugh  at  them — and  by 
laughing  at  them  destroy  them?  For  your  race,  in  its 
poverty,  has  unquestionably  one  really  effective  weapon 
— laughter.  Power,  money,  persuasion,  supplication, 
persecution — these  can  lift  at  a  colossal  humbug — push 
it  a  little — weaken  it  a  little,  century  by  century;  but 
only  laughter  can  blow  it  to  rags  and  atoms  at  a  blast. 
...  As  a  race,  do  you  ever  use  it  at  all  ?  No ;  you  lack 
sense  and  the  courage."  It  was  satire  that  he  had  in 
mind  when  he  wrote  these  lines,  the  great  purifying 
force  with  which  nature  had  endowed  him,  but  of  the 
use  of  which  his  life  had  deprived  him.  How  many 
times  he  confessed  that  it  was  he  who  lacked  the 
"courage"!  How  many  times  we  have  seen  that  if  he 
lacked  the  courage  it  was  because,  quite  literally,  he 
lacked  the  "sense,"  the  consciousness,  that  is  to  say,  of 
his  own  powers,  of  his  proper  function !  Satire  necessi- 
tates, above  all,  a  supreme  degree  of  moral  maturity, 
a  supreme  sense  of  proportion,  a  free  individual  posi- 
tion. As  for  Mark  Twain,  by  reacting  immediately  to 
every  irritating  stimulus  he  had  literally  sworn  and 
joked  away  the  energy,  the  indignation,  that  a  free  life 
would  have  enabled  him  to  store  up,  the  energy  that 
would  have  made  him  not  the  public  ventilator  that  hg 
became  but  the  regenerator  he  was  meant  to  be.  Mr. 
Paine  speaks  of  his  "high-pressure  intellectual  engine." 


220    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Let  us  follow  the  metaphor  by  saying  that  Mark  Twain 
permitted  the  steam  in  his  system  to  escape  as  fast  as 
it  was  generated:  he  permitted  it  to  escape  instead  of 
harnessing  it  till  the  time  was  ripe  to  "blow  to  rags 
and  atoms"  that  world  of  humbug  against  which  he 
chafed  all  his  life.  But  he  had  staked  everything  upon 
the  dream  of  happiness;  and  humor,  by  affording  him 
an  endless  series  of  small  assuagements,  enabled  him  to 
maintain  that  equilibrium.  "  I  am  tired  to  death  all  the 
time,"  he  wrote  in  1895,  out  of  the  stress  of  his  financial 
anxieties.  With  that  in  mind  we  can  appreciate  the  un- 
conscious irony  in  Mr.  Paine 's  comment:  "Perhaps, 
after  all,  it  was  his  comic  outlook  on  things  in  general 
that  was  his  chief  life-saver." 


CHAPTER  X 

LET  WMEBODY  ELSE  BEGIN 

"No  real  gentleman  will  tell  the  naked  truth  in  the  presence 
of  ladies." 

A  Double-Barrelled  Detective  Story. 

I  AM  persuaded  that  the  future  historian  of  America 
will  find  your  works  as  indispensable  to  him  as 
a  French  historian  finds  the  political  tracts  of  Voltaire." 
In  these  words,  which  he  addressed  to  Mark  Twain  him- 
self, Bernard  Shaw  suggested  what  was  undoubtedly 
the  dominant  intention  of  Mark  Twain's  genius,  the 
role  which  he  was,  if  one  may  say  so,  pledged  by  nature 
to  fulfill.  "He  will  be  remembered,"  says  Mr.  Howells, 
"with  the  great  humorists  of  all  time,  with  Cervantes, 
with  Swift,  or  with  any  others  worthy  of  his  company. ' ' 
Voltaire,  Cervantes,  Swift !  It  was  as  a  satirist,  we  per- 
ceive, as  a  spiritual  emancipator,  that  those  of  his  con- 
temporaries who  most  generously  realized  him  thought 
of  Mark  Twain.  Did  they  not,  under  the  spell  of  that 
extraordinary  personal  presence  of  his,  in  the  magnet- 
ism, the  radiance  of  what  might  be  called  his  tempera- 
mental will-to-satire,  mistake  the  wish  for  the  deed? 

What  is  a  satirist?  A  satirist,  if  I  am  not  mistaken, 
is  one  who  holds  up  to  the  measure  of  some  more  or 
less  permanently  admirable  ideal  the  inadequacies  and 
the  deformities  of  the  society  in  which  he  lives.  It  is 
Rabelais  holding  up  to  the  measure  of  healthy-minded- 
ness  the  obscurantism  of  the  Middle  Ages ;  it  is  Moliere 
holding  up  to  the  measure  on  an  excellent  sociality 
everything  that  is  eccentric,  inelastic,  intemperate ;  it  is 
Voltaire  holding  up  to  the  measure  of  the  intelligence 


222    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  forces  of  darkness  and  superstition :  it  is  a  criticism 
of  the  spirit  of  one's  age,  and  of  the  facts  in  so  far  as 
the  spirit  is  embodied  in  them,  dictated  by  some  power- 
ful, personal  and  supremely  conscious  reaction  against 
that  spirit.  If  this  is  true,  Mark  Twain  cannot  be  called 
a  satirist.  Certain  of  the  facts  of  American  life  he  did 
undoubtedly  satirize.  "The  state  of  American  society 
and  government  his  stories  and  articles  present,"  says 
Miss  Edith  Wyatt,  "is,  broadly  speaking,  truthfully 
characteristic  of  the  state  of  society  and  government  we 
find  now  in  Chicago,  the  most  murderous  and  lawless 
civil  community  in  the  world.  What  is  exceptional  in 
our  great  humorist's  view  of  our  national  life  is  not  the 
ruffianism  of  the  existence  he  describes  for  us  on  the 
Mississippi  and  elsewhere  in  the  United  States,  but  the 
fact  that  he  writes  the  truth  about  it."  Who  will  deny 
that  this  is  so?  Mark  Twain  satirizes  the  facts,  or  some 
,of  the  facts,  of  our  social  life,  he  satirizes  them  vehe- 
mently. But  when  it  comes  to  the  spirit  of  our  social 
life,  that  is  quite  another  matter.  Let  us  take  his  own 
humorous  testimony:  "The  silent,  colossal  National  Lie 
that  is  the  support  and  confederate  of  all  the  tyrannies 
and  shams  and  inequalities  and  unfairnesses  that  afflict 
the  peoples — that  is  the  one  to  throw  bricks  and  sermons 
'at.  But*  let  us  be  judicious  and  let  somebody  else 
begin." 

It  has  often  been  said  that  Mark  Twain  "lost  his 
nerve."  It  ought  to  be  sufficiently  clear  by  this  time, 
however,  that  he  did  not  lose  his  nerve,  simply  because, 
in  reality,  he  had  never  found  it.  He  had  never,  despite 
Mr.  Howells,  "come  into  his  intellectual  consciousness" 
at  all,  he  had  never  come  into  the  consciousness  of  any 
ideal  that  could  stand  for  him  as  a  measure  of  the  so- 
ciety about  him.  Moreover,  he  had  so  involved  himself 
in  the  whole  popular  complex  of  the  Gilded  Age  that 
he  could  not  strike  out  in  any  direction  without  wound- 
ing his  wife  or  his  friends,  without  contravening  some 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      223 

loyalty  that  had  become  sacred  to  him,  without  destroy- 
ing the  very  basis  of  his  happiness.  We  have  seen  that 
he  had  never  risen  to  the  conception  of  literature  as  a 
great  impersonal  social  instrument.  An  irresponsible 
child  himself,  he  could  not  even  feel  that  he  had  a  right 
to  exercise  a  will-to-satire  that  violated  the  wishes  of 
those  to  whom  he  had  subjected  himself.  Consequently, 
instead  of  satirizing  the  spirit  of  his  age,  he  outwardly 
acquiesced  in  it  and  even  flattered  it. 

If  anything  is  certain,  however,  it  is  that  Mark  Twain 
was  intended  to  be  a  sort  of  American  Rabelais  who 
would  have  done,  as  regards  the  puritanical  commer- 
cialism of  the  Gilded  Age,  very  much  what  the  author 
of  ' '  Pantagruel "  did  as  regards  the  obsolescent  me- 
diaevalism  of  sixteenth-century  France.  Reading  his 
books  and  his  life  one  seems  to  divine  his  proper  char- 
acter and  career  embedded  in  the  life  of  his  generation 
as  the  bones  of  a  dinosaur  are  embedded  in  a  prehistoric 
clay-bank:  many  of  the  vertebrae  are  missing,  other 
parts  have  crumbled  away,  we  cannot  with  final  cer- 
tainty identify  the  portentous  creature.  But  the  di- 
mensions help  us,  the  skull,  the  thigh,  the  major  mem- 
bers are  beyond  dispute ;  we  feel  that  we  are  justified 
from  the  evidence  in  assuming  what  sort  of  being  we 
have  before  us,  and  our  imagination  fills  out  in  detail 
what  its  appearance  must,  or  rather  would,  have  been. 

When  we  consider  how  many  of  Mark  Twain's  yarns 
and  anecdotes,  the  small  change  as  it  were  of  his  literary 
life,  had  for  their  butt  the  petty  aspects  of  the  tribal 
morality  of  America — Sabbath-breaking,  the  taboos  of 
the  Sunday  School,  the  saws  of  Poor  Richard's  Almanac, 
we  can  see  that  his  birthright  was  of  our  age  rather 
than  of  his  own.  Hear  what  he  says  of  ''the  late  Ben- 
jamin Franklin":  "His  maxims  were  full  of  animosity 
toward  boys.  Nowadays  a  boy  cannot  follow  out  a  sin- 
gle natural  instinct  without  tumbling  over  some  of  those 
everlasting  aphorisms  and  hearing  from  Franklin  on 


224     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  spot.  If  he  buys  two  cents'  worth  of  peanuts,  his 
father  says,  'Remember  what  Franklin  has  said,  my 
son,  "A  groat  a  day's  a  penny  a  year,"  '  and  the  com- 
fort is  all  gone  out  of  those  peanuts."  He  delights  in 
turning  the  inherited  wisdom  of  the  pioneers  into  such 
forms  as  this:  "Never  put  off  till  to-morrow  what  you 
can  do  day  after  to-morrow,  just  as  well."  Here  we 
have  the  note  of  Huckleberry  Finn,  who  is  not  so  much 
at  war  with  the  tribal  morality  as  impervious  to  it,  as 
impervious  as  a  child  of  another  epoch.  He  visits  a 
certain  house  at  night  and  describes  the  books  he  finds 
piled  on  the  parlor  table:  "One  was  'Pilgrim's  Pro- 
gress,' about  a  man  that  left  his  family,  it  didn't  say 
why.  I  read  considerable  in  it  now  and  then.  The 
statements  was  interesting,  but  tough."  And  again, 
speaking  of  a  family  dinner:  "Uncle  Silas  he  asked  a 
pretty  long  blessing  over  it,  but  it  was  worth  it;  and 
it  didn't  cool  it  a  bit,  neither,  the  way  I've  seen  them 
kind  of  interruptions  do  lots  of  times."  One  may  say 
that  a  man  in  whom  the  continuity  of  racial  experience 
is  cut  as  sharply  as  these  passages  indicate  it  was  cut  in 
Mark  Twain  is  headed  straight  for  an  inferior  cyni- 
cism; but  what  is  almost  destiny  for  the  ordinary  man 
is  the  satirist's  opportunity:  if  he  can  recover  himself 
quickly,  if  he  can  substitute  a  new  and  personal  ideal 
for  the  racial  ideal  he  has  abandoned,  that  solution  of 
continuity  is  the  making  of  him.  For  Mark  Twain  this 
was  impossible.  I  have  already  given  many  instances 
of  his  instinctive  revolt  against  the  spirit  of  his  time, 
moral,  religious,  political,  economic.  "My  idea  of  our 
civilization,"  he  said,  freely,  in  private,  "is  that  it  is 
a  shabby  poor  thing  and  full  of  cruelties,  vanities,  arro- 
gancies,  meannesses  and  hypocrisies.  As  for  the  word,  I 
hate  the  sound  of  it,  for  it  conveys  a  lie ;  and  as  for  the 
thing  itself,  I  wish  it  was  in  hell,  where  it  belongs." 
And  consider  this  grave  conclusion  in  one  of  his  later 
letters:  "Well,  the  19th  century  made  progress — the 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      225 

first  progress  in  'ages  and  ages' — colossal  progress.  In 
what?  Materialities.  Prodigious  acquisitions  were 
made  in  things  which  add  to  the  comfort  of  many  and 
make  life  harder  for  as  taany  more.  But  the  addition 
to  righteousness?  Is  that  discoverable?  I  think  not. 
The  materialities  were  not  invented  in  the  interest  of 
righteousness;  that  there  is  more  righteousness  in  the 
world  because  of  them  than  there  was  before,  is  hardly 
demonstrable,  I  think.  In  Europe  and  America  there 
is  a  vast  change  (due  to  them)  in  ideals — do  you  admire 
it?  All  Europe  and  all  America  are  feverishly  scram- 
bling for  money.  Money  is  the  supreme  ideal — all  others 
take  tenth  place  with  the  great  bulk  of  the  nations 
named.  Money-lust  has  always  existed,  but  not  in  the 
history  of  the  world  was  it  ever  a  craze,  a  madness, 
until  your  time  and  mine.  This  lust  has  rotted  these 
nations;  it  has  made  them  hard,  sordid,  ungentle,  dis- 
honest, oppressive."  Who  can  fail  to  see  that  the  whole 
tendency  of  Mark  Twain's  spirit  ran  precisely  counter 
to  the  spirit  of  his  age,  that  he  belonged  as  naturally 
in  the  Opposition,  as  I  have  said,  as  all  the  great  Euro- 
pean writers  of  his  time?  Can  we  not  also  see,  accord- 
ingly, that  in  stultifying  him,  in  keeping  him  a  child, 
his  wife  and  his  friends  were  the  unconscious  agents  of 
the  business  regime,  bent  upon  deflecting  and  restrain- 
ing a  force  which,  if  it  had  matured,  would  have 
seriously  interfered  with  the  enterprise  of  industrial 
pioneering  ? 

Far  from  having  any  stimulus  to  satire,  therefore, 
Mark  Twain  was  perpetually  driven  back  by  the  innu- 
merable obligations  he  had  assumed  into  the  role  that 
gave  him,  as  he  said,  comfort  and  peace.  And  to  what 
did  he  not  have  to  submit?  "We  shall  have  bloody 
work  in  this  country  some  of  these  days  when  the  lazy 
canaille  get  organized.  They  are  the  spawn  of  Santerre 
and  Fouquier-Tinville, ' '  we  find  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich 
writing  to  Professor  Woodberry  in  1894.  There  was 


226    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

\  the  attitude  of  Mark  Twain's  intimates  toward  social 
and  economic  questions:  the  literary  confraternity  of 
the  generation  was  almost  a  solid  block  behind  the  finan- 
cial confraternity.  In  the  moral  and  religious  depart- 
ments the  path  of  the  candidate  for  gentility  was  no 
less  strait  and  narrow.  "It  took  a  brave  man  before 
the  Civil  War,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "to  confess  he  had 
read  '  The  Age  of  Reason '  " :  Mark  Twain  observed  once 
that  he  had  read  it  as  a  cub  pilot  "with  fear  and  hesi- 
tation." A  man  whose  life  had  been  staked  on  the 
pursuit  of  prestige,  in  short,  could  take  no  chances  in 
those  days!  The  most  fearful  warnings  followed  Mark 
Twain  to  the  end.  In  1880  or  thereabouts  he  saw  his 
brother  Orion,  in  the  Middle  West,  excommunicated, 
after  a  series  of  infidel  lectures,  and  "condemned  to 
eternal  flames"  by  his  own  Church,  the  Presbyterian 
Church.  "Huckleberry  Finn"  and  "Tom  Sawyer" 
were  constantly  being  suppressed  as  immoral  by  the 
public  libraries,  and  not  in  rural  districts  merely  but 
in  great  centers:  in  Denver  and  Omaha  in  1903,  in 
godly  Brooklyn  as  late  as  1906.  If  the  morals  of  those 
boys  were  considered  heretical,  what  would  have  been 
thought  of  Mark  Twain's  other  opinions?  Even  the 
title  he  suggested  for  his  first  important  book — "The 
New  Pilgrim's  Progress" — was  regarded  in  Hartford 
as  a  sacrilege.  The  trustees  of  the  American  Publishing 
Company  flatly  refused  to  have  anything  to  do  with  it, 
and  it  was  only  when  the  money-charmer  Bliss  threat- 
ened to  resign  if  he  was  not  allowed  to  publish  the 
book  that  these  pious  gentlemen,  who  abhorred  heresy, 
but  loved  money  more  than  they  abhorred  heresy,  gave 
in.  It  was  these  same  gentlemen  who  later  became  Mark 
Twain's  neighbors  and  daily  associates:  it  was  with 
them  he  shared  that  happy  Hartford  society  upon  whose 
"community  of  interests"  and  "unity  of  ideals"  the 
loyal  Mr.  Paine  is  obliged  to  dwell  in  his  biography. 
Was  Mark  Twain  to  be  expected  to  attack  them? 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      227 

His  spirit  was  indeed  quiescent  during  the  middle 
years  of  his  life:  it  is  only  in  his  early  work,  and  only 
in  his  minor  work,  his  "Sketches,"  that  we  find,  smug- 
gled in  as  it  were  among  so  many  other  notes,  the  frank 
note  of  the  satirist.  One  recalls  the  promise  he  had 
made,  as  a  sort  of  oblique  acknowledgment  of  his  father- 
in-law's  loan,  to  the  readers  of  his  Buffalo  paper:  "I 
only  want  to  assure  parties  having  a  friendly  interest 
in  the  prosperity  of  the  journal  that  I  am  not  going  to 
hurt  the  paper  deliberately  and  intentionally  at  any 
time.  I  am  not  going  to  introduce  any  startling  re- 
forms, nor  in  any  way  attempt  to  make  trouble."  He, 
that  "rough  Western  miner"  on  probation,  knew  that 
he  could  not  be  too  circumspect.  And  yet  among  those 
early  sketches  a  risky  note  now  and  then  intrudes  itself : 
"A  Mysterious  Visit,"  for  example,  that  very  telling 
animadversion  upon  a  society  in  which  "thousands  of 
the  richest  and  proudest,  the  most  respected,  honored 
and  courted  men"  lie  about  their  income  to  the  tax- 
collector  "every  year."  Is  it  not  the  case,  however, 
that  as  time  went  on  he  got  into  the  habit  of  somehow 
not  noticing  these  little  spots  on  the  American  sun? 

In  "The  Gilded  Age,"  it  is  true,  his  first  and  only 
novel,  he  seems  frank  enough.  One  remembers  the 
preface  of  that  book :  "  It  will  be  seen  that  it  deals  with 
an  entirely  ideal  state  of  society;  and  the  chief  embar- 
rassment of  the  writers  in  this  realm  of  the  imagination 
has  been  the  want  of  illustration.  In  a  state  where  there 
is  no  fever  of  speculation,  no  inflamed  desire  for  sudden 
wealth,  where  the  poor  are  all  simple-minded  and  con« 
tented,  and  the  rich  are  all  honest  and  generous,  where 
society  is  in  a  condition  of  primitive  purity,  and  politics 
is  the  occupation  of  only  the  capable  and  the  patriotic, 
there  are  necessarily  no  materials  for  such  a  history  as 
we  have  constructed  out  of  an  ideal  commonwealth." 
That  is  fairly  explicit  and  fairly  animated,  even  if  it 
is  only  a  paragraph  from  a  preface;  and  in  fact  the 


228     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

whole  background  of  the  story,  from  the  capital  city, 
that  "grand  old  benevolent  national  asylum  for  the 
Helpless,"  down,  with  its  devasting  irony  about  every 
American  institution  save  family  life — Congress,  the 
law,  trial  by  jury,  journalism,  business,  education  and 
the  Church,  East  and  West' alike,  almost  prepares  us 
for  Mark  Twain's  final  verdict  regarding  the  "Bless- 
ings-of -Civilization  Trust."  And  yet  the  total  effect  of 
the  book  is  idyllic ;  the  mirage  of  the  America  Myth  lies 
over  it  like  a  rosy  veil.  Mark  Twain  might  permit  him- 
self a  certain  number  of  acid  glances  at  the  actual  face 
of  reality;  but  he  had  to  redeem  himself,  he  wished  to 
redeem  himself  for  doing  so — for  the  story  was  written 
to  meet  the  challenge  of  certain  ladies  in  Hartford — 
by  making  the  main  thread  the  happy  domestic  tale  of 
a  well  brought  up  young  man  who  finds  in  this  very 
stubbly  field  the  amplest  and  the  softest  straw  for  the 
snug  family  nest  he  builds  in  the  end.  Would  he,  for 
that  matter,  have  presumed  to  say  his  say  at  all  if  he 
had  not  had  the  moral  support  of  the  collaboration  of 
Charles  Dudley  Warner?  "Clemens,"  we  are  told, 
"had  the  beginning  of  a  story  in  his  mind,  but  had  been 
unwilling  to  undertake  an  extended  work  of  fiction 
alone.  He  welcomed  only  too  eagerly,  therefore,  the 
proposition  of  joint  authorship."  Mark  Twain,  the 
darling  of  the  masses,  brought  Warner  a  return  in 
money  such  as  he  probably  never  experienced  again  in 
his  life;  Warner,  the  respected  Connecticut  man  of 
letters,  gave  Mark  Twain  the  sanction  of  his  name.  An 
admirable  combination!  A  model  indeed,  one  might 
have  thought  it,  for  all  New  Englanders  in  their  deal- 
ings with  the  West. 

Am  I  exaggerating  the  significance  of  what  might  be 
taken  for  an  accident?  In  any  case,  it  was  not  until 
that  latter  period  when  he  was  too  old  and  too  secure 
in  his  seat  to  fear  public  opinion  quite  in  this  earlier 
way  that  he  had  his  revenge  in  "The  Man  That  Cor- 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin       229 

rupted  Hadleyburg" — not  till  then,  and  then  only  in  a 
measure  did  he  ever  again,  openly  and  on  a  large  scale, 
attack  the  spiritual  integrity  of  industrial  America. 
Occasionally,  in  some  little  sketch  like  ' '  The  Great  Revo- 
lution in  Pitcairn,"  where  the  Presbyterian  Yankee  is 
described  as  "a  doubtful  acquisition,"  he  ventures  a 
pinprick  in  the  dark;  and  we  know  that  he  sent  his 
"1601"  anonymously  to  a  magazine  editor  who  had 
once  remarked,  "0  that  we  had  a  Rabelais!":  "I 
judged,"  said  Mark  Twain,  "that  I  could  furnish  him 
one."  But  he  had  had  his  fingers  burnt  too  often: 
he  had  no  intention  of  persisting.  It  is  notable,  there- 
fore, that  having  begun  with  contemporary  society  m 
"The  Gilded  Age,"  he  travels  backward  into  the  past 
for  his  subsequent  pseudo-satirical  themes:  he  feels  free 
to  express  his  social  indignation  only  in  terms  of  the 
seventh  century  England  of  the  "Connecticut  Yan- 
kee," the  fifteenth  century  England  of  "The  Prince 
and  the  Pauper,"  the  fourteenth  century  France  of 
"Joan  of  Arc,"  the  sixteenth  century  Austria  of  "The 
Mysterious  Stranger."  Never  again  America,  one 
observes,  and  never  again  the  present,  for  the  first  of 
these  books  alone  contains  anything  like  a  contemporary 
social  implication  and  that,  the  implication  of  the  "Con- 
necticut Yankee,"  is  a  flattering  one.  But  I  am  ex- 
aggerating. Mark  Twain  does  attack  the  present  in  the 
persons  of  the  Czar  and  King  Leopold,  whom  all  good 
Americans  abhorred.  As  for  his  attacks  on  corruption 
in  domestic  politics,  on  the  missionaries  in  China,  was 
he  not,  when  he  at  last  "spoke  out,"  supported  by  the 
leading  citizens  who  are  always  ready  to  back  the  right 
sort  of  prophet?  Turn  to  Mr.  Paine 's  biography:  you 
will  find  Mr.  Carnegie,  whom  he  called  Saint  Andrew, 
begging  Saint  Mark  for  permission  to  print  and  dis- 
tribute in  proper  form  that  "sacred  message"  about 
the  missionaries.  Mark  Twain  knew  how  to  estimate 
the  sanctity  of  his  own  moral  courage.  "Do  right," 


230    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

he  notes,  in  his  private  memoranda — ' '  do  right  and  you 
will  be  conspicuous." 

Let  us  take  one  more  instance,  the  supreme  instance, 
of  Mark  Twain 's  intention  and  failure  in  his  predestined 
role,  the  " Connecticut  Yankee"  itself.  This  was  his 
largest  canvas,  his  greatest  creative  effort,  the  most 
ambitious  and  in  certain  respects  the  most  powerful  of 
his  works.  Nothing  could  be  more  illuminating  than 
a  glance  at  his  motives  in  writing  it. 

What,  in  the  first  place,  was  his  ostensible  motive? 
"The  book,"  he  says,  in  a  letter  to  his  English  pub- 
lisher, "was  not  written  for  America;  it  was  written 
for  England.  So  many  Englishmen  have  done  their 
sincerest  best  to  teach  us  something  for  our  betterment 
that  it  seems  to  me  high  time  that  some  of  us  should 
substantially  recognize  the  good  intent  by  trying  to  pry 
up  the  English  nation  to  a  little  higher  level  of  man- 
hood in  turn." 

No  doubt,  if  Mark  Twain  had  read  this  over  in  cold 
blood  he  would  have  blushed  for  his  own  momentary 
priggishness ;  it  was  not  characteristic  of  him  to  talk 
about  "higher  levels  of  manhood."  But  he  was  in  a 
pet.  Matthew  Arnold  had  been  wandering  among  us, 
with  many  deprecating  gestures  of  those  superangelic 
hands  of  his.  Matthew  Arnold  must  always  have  been 
slightly  irritating — he  was  irritating  even  at  home,  and 
how  much  more  irritating  when,  having  visited  this  coun- 
try, he  chose  to  dwell  upon  the  rudimentary  language 
of  General  Grant!  Mark  Twain  saw  red.  An  animad- 
version upon  General  Grant's  grammar  was  an  attack 
upon  General  Grant,  an  attack  upon  General  Grant  was 
an  attack  upon  America,  an  attack  upon  America  and 
upon  General  Grant  was  an  attack  upon  Mark  Twain, 
upon  his  heart  as  a  friend  of  General  Grant,  upon  his 
pocket-book  as  the  publisher  of  General  Grant,  upon 
his  amour-propre  as  the  countryman  of  General  Grant. 
The  pioneer  in  him  rose  to  the  assault  like  a  bull-buffalo 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin       231 

in  defense  of  the  herd.  Mark  Twain  relapsed  into  a 
typical  Huck  Finn  attitude :  he  doubled  his  fists  and 
said,  "You're  another!" — just  as  he  did  a  few  years 
later  in  his  reply  to  Paul  Bourget.  Then,  longing  for 
' '  a  pen  warmed-up  in  hell, ' '  he  set  to  work  to  put  those 
redcoats,  Matthew  Arnold,  King  George  III,  General 
Cornwallis  and  all  the  rest  of  them,  for  by  this  time 
he  was  in  the  full  furore  of  the  myth  of  the  American 
Revolution,  in  their  place.  He  even  began  a  frantic 
defense  of  American  newspapers,  which  at  other  times 
he  could  not  revile  enough,  and  filled  his  note-books 
with  red-hot  absurdities  like  this :  ' '  Show  me  a  lord  and 
I  will  show  you  a  man  whom  you  couldn't  tell  from  a 
journeyman  shoemaker  if  he  were  stripped,  and  who, 
in  all  that  is  worth  being,  is  the  shoemaker's  inferior." 
In  short,  he  covered  both  shoulders  with  chips  and 
defied  any  and  every  Englishman,  the  whole  English 
race,  indeed,  to  come  and  knock  them  off. 

Now  here,  I  say,  is  the  crucial  instance  of  Mai 
Twain's  failure  as  a  satirist.  In  the  moment  of  crisis 
the  individual  in  him  loses  itself  in  the  herd ;  the  intel- 
lect is  submerged  in  a  blind  emotion  that  leads  him, 
unconsciously,  into  a  sort  of  bouleversement  of  all  his 
actual  personal  intentions.  Against  his  instinct,  against 
his  purpose  he  finds  himself  doing,  not  the  thing  he 
really  desires  to  do,  i.  e.,  to  pry  up  the  American  nation, 
if  the  phrase  must  be  used,  "to  a  little  higher  level  of 
manhood,"  which  is  the  true  office  of  an  American 
satirist,  but  to  flatter  the  American  nation  and  lull  its 
conscience  to  sleep.  In  short,  instead  of  doing  the 
unpopular  thing,  which  he  really  wanted  to  do,  he  does 
the  most  popular  thing  of  all :  he  glorifies  the  Yankee 
mechanic,  already,  in  his  own  country,  surfeited  with 
glory,  and  pours  ridicule  upon  the  two  things  that  least 
needed  ridicule  for  the  good  of  the  Yankee  mechanic's 
soul,  if  only  because  in  his  eyes  they  were  sufficiently 
ridiculous  already — England  and  the  Middle  Ages. 


232     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

Could  we  have  a  better  illustration  of  the  betrayal  of 
Mark  Twain's  genius?  If  any  country  ever  needed 
satire  it  is,  and  was,  America.  Did  not  Mark  Twain 
feel  this  himself  in  those  rare  moments  of  his  middle 
years  when  he  saw  things  truly  with  his  own  eyes? 
Let  us  take  from  his  letters  a  comment  on  American 
society  that  proves  it:  "There  was  absolutely  nothing 
in  the  morning  papers,"  he  writes  in  1873:  "you  can 
see  for  yourself  what  the  telegraphic  headings  were: 
BY  TELEGRAPH— A  Father  Killed  by  His  Son,  A 
Bloody  Fight  in  Kentucky,  An  Eight-Year-Old  Mur- 
derer, A  Town  in  a  State  of  General  Riot,  A  Court 
House  Fired  and  Three  Negroes  Therein  Shot  While 
Escaping,  A  Louisiana  Massacre,  Two  to  Three  Hun- 
dred Men  Roasted  Alive,  A  Lively  Skirmish  in  Indiana 
(and  thirty  other  similar  headings).  The  items  under 
those  headings  all  bear  date  yesterday,  April  16  (refer 
to  your  own  paper) — and  I  give  you  my  word  of  honor 
that  that  string  of  commonplace  stuff  was  everything 
there  was  in  the  telegraphic  columns  that  a  body  could 
call  news.  Well,  said  I  to  myself,  this  is  getting  pretty 
dull;  this  is  getting  pretty  dry;  there  don't  appear  to 
be  anything  going  on  anywhere;  has  this  progressive 
nation  gone  to  sleep?"  Knowing  as  we  do  the  sig- 
nificance of  Mark  Twain's  humor,  we  divine  from  the 
lone  of  these  final  comments  that  he  already  considers 
it  none  of  his  business,  that  as  a  writer  he  proposes 
to  do  nothing  about  it.  But  his  eye  is  exceedingly  wide 
open  to  those  things!  Would  not  any  one  say,  there- 
fore, that  there  is  something  rather  singular  in  the 
spectacle  of  a  human  being  living  alertly  in  a  land 
where  such  incidents  were  the  staple  of  news  and  yet 
being  possessed  with  an  exclusive  public  passion  to  ' '  pry 
the  English  nation  up  to  a  little  higher  level  of  man- 
hood"? Isn't  it  strange  to  see  the  inhabitant  of  a  coun- 
try where  negroes  were  being  lynched  at  an  average 
rate  of  one  every  four  days  filled  with  "a  holy  fire  of 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin       233 

righteous  wrath,"  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  because  people 
were  unjustly  hanged  in  the  seventh  century?  Mark 
Twain  was  sincerely  angry,  there  is  no  doubt  about 
that.  But  isn't  it  curious  how  automatically  his  anger 
was  deflected  from  all  its  natural  and  immediate  objects, 
from  all  those  objects  it  might  have  altered,  and 
turned  like  an  air-craft  gun  upon  the  vacuity  of 
space  itself?  "Perhaps,"  he  says,  in  "What  Is  Man?" 
defining  what  he  calls  the  master  passion,  the 
hunger  for  self-approval,  "perhaps  there  is  something 
that  (man)  loves  more  than  he  loves  peace — the  ap- 
proval of  his  neighbors  and  the  public.  And  per- 
haps there  is  something  which  he  dreads  more  than 
he  dreads  pain — the  disapproval  of  his  neighbors  and 
the  public."  Mark  Twain  ate  his  cake  and  had  it 
too.  He  avoided  the  disapproval  of  his  neighbors  by 
not  attacking  America ;  he  won  their  approval  by  attack- 
ing England.  Then,  as  we  can  see  from  his  famous 
letter  to  Andrew  Lang,  he  tried  to  win  the  approval 
of  England  also  by  deprecating  the  opinion  of  culti- 
vated readers  and  saying  that  he  only  wanted  to  be 
taken  as  a  popular  entertainer!  "I  have  never  tried, 
in  even  one  single  little  instance,  to  help  cultivate  the 
cultivated  classes.  .  .  .  And  I  never  had  any  ambition 
in  that  direction,  but  always  hunted  for  bigger  game — 
the  masses.  I  have  seldom  deliberately  tried  to  instruct 
them,  but  I  have  done  my  best  to  entertain  them,  for 
they  can  get  instruction  elsewhere."  That  was  what 
became  of  his  noble  purpose  to  "pry  up  the  English 
nation"  when  the  English  nation  manifested  its  objec- 
tion to  being  pried  up  by  virtually  boycotting  the  book. 
The  wiles  of  simple  folk !  They  are  the  most  successful 
of  all. 

The  ironical  part  of  this  story — for  it  is  worth  pur- 
suing— is  that  Mark  Twain,  the  sober  individual,  had 
for  England  an  exaggerated  affection  and  admiration. 
His  "first  hour  in  England  was  an  hour  of  delight," 


234     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

he  records;  "of  rapture  and  ecstacy. "  "I  would  a 
good  deal  rather  live  here  if  I  could  get  the  rest  of  you 
over,"  he  writes  frankly  in  1872;  and  Mr.  Paine  adds 
that,  "  taking  the  snug  island  as  a  whole,  its  people,  its 
institutions" — its  institutions,  observe — "its  fair  rural 
aspects,  he  had  found  in  it  only  delight."  That  was 
true  to  the  end  of  his  days ;  against  a  powerful  instinct 
he  defended  even  the  Boer  War  because  he  so  admired 
the  genius  of  English  administration.  He  had  personal 
reasons  for  this,  indeed,  in  the  affection  with  which 
England  always  welcomed  him.  "On  no  occasion  in  his 
own  country,"  we  are  told,  of  his  first  English  lecture 
tour,  "had  he  won  such  a  complete  triumph";  and 
how  many  of  those  triumphs  there  were!  "As  a  rule," 
says  Mr.  Paine,  "English  readers  of  culture,  critical 
readers,  rose  to  an  understanding  of  Mark  Twain's 
literary  value  with  greater  promptness  than  did  the 
same  class  of  readers  at  home."  "Indeed,"  says  Mr. 
Howells,  "it  was  in  England  that  Mark  Twain  was 
first  made  to  feel  that  he  had  come  into  his  rightful 
heritage."  Did  his  feeling  for  England  spring  from 
this?  Who  can  say?  But  certainly  it  was  intense  and 
profound.  Early  in  his-  life  he  planned,  as  we  have 
seen,  a  book  on  England  and  gave  it  up  because  he  was 
afraid  its  inevitable  humor  would  "offend  those  who 
had  taken  him  into  their  hearts  and  homes."  Why, 
then,  safely  enthroned  in  America,  did  he,  merely  be- 
cause he  was  annoyed  with  Matthew  Arnold,  so  pas- 
sionately desire  to  "pry"  the  English  nation  up?  One 
key  to  this  question  we  have  already  found,  but  it 
requires  a  deeper  explanation;  and  the  incident  of  this 
earlier  book  suggests  it.  Mark  Twain 's  literary  motives, 
and  it  was  this,  as  I  have  said,  that  made  him  the  typical 
pioneer,  were  purely  personal.  Emerson  wrote  his 
"English  Traits"  before  the  Civil  War:  in  reporting 
his  conversation  with  Walter  Savage  Landor,  he  made 
a  remark  that  could  not  fail  to  hurt  the  feelings  of 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      235 

Eobert  Southey.  What  was  his  reason,  what  was  his 
excuse?  That  Southey  and  Landor  were  public  figures 
and  that  their  values  were  values  of  public  importance. 
Emerson,  in  short,  instinctively  regarded  his  function, 
his  loyalties  and  his  responsibilities  as  those  of  the  man 
of  letters,  the  servant  of  humanity.  Mark  Twain,  no 
less  typical  of  his  own  half-century,  took  with  him  to 
England  the  pioneer  sj^stem  of  values  in  which  every- 
thing was  measured  by  the  ideal  of  neighborliness.  If 
he  couldn't  write  without  hurting  people's  feelings,  he 
wouldn't  write  at  all,  for  always,  like  the  good  West- 
erner, he  thought  of  his  audience  as  the  group  of  people 
immediately  surrounding  him.  In  America,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  situation  was  precisely  reversed.  What 
would  please  his  Hartford  neighbors,  who  had  taken 
him  into  their  hearts  and  homes? — that  was  the  point 
now;  and  they,  or  the  less  cultivated  majority  of  them, 
could  not  see  England,  through  the  eyes  of  a  Con- 
necticut Yankee,  damned  enough!  Something,  Mark 
Twain  knew,  he  wanted  to  satirize — he  was  boiling  with 
satirical  emotion;  and  while  the  artist  in  him  wished 
to  satirize  not  England  but  America,  the  pioneer  in  him 
wished  to  satirize  not  America  but  England.  And  as 
usual  the  pioneer  won. 

Another  motive  corroborated  this  decision.  "He  had 
published,"  Mr.  Paine  tells  us,  "nothing  since  the 
'Huck  Finn'  story,  and  his  company  was  badly  in 
need  of  a  new  book  by  an  author  of  distinction.  Also, 
it  was  highly  desirable  to  earn  money  for  himself." 
Elsewhere  we  read  that  the  "Connecticut  Yankee" 
"was  a  book  badly  needed  by  his  publishing  business 
with  which  to  maintain  its  prestige  and  profit."  Mark 
Twain,  the  author,  we  see,  had  to  serve  the  prestige 
and  profit  of  Mark  Twain,  the  publisher ;  he  was  obliged, 
in  short,  to  write  something  that  would  be  popular  with 
the  American  masses.  How  happy  that  publisher  must 
have  been  for  the  provocation  Matthew  Arnold  offered 


236     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

him!  Mark  Twain,  on  the  top-wave  of  his  own  capital- 
istic undertakings,  was  simply  expressing  the  exuber- 
ance of  his  own  character  not  as  an  artist  but  as  an 
industrial  pioneer  in  the  person  of  that  East  Hartford 
Yankee  who  sets  out  to  make  King  Arthur's  England 
a  "going  concern."  Who  can  mistake  this  animus? — 
"Look  at  the  opportunities  here  for  a  man  of  knowledge, 
brains,  pluck  and  enterprise  to  sail  in  and  grow  up  with 
the  country.  The  grandest  field  that  ever  was;  and 
all  my  own,  not  a  competitor."  Prying  up  the  English 
nation  ends,  as  we  see,  with  a  decided  general  effect  of 
patting  the  American  nation  on  the  back.  The  satirist 
has  joined  forces  with  the  great  popular  flood  of  his 
generation;  he  has  become  that  flood;  he  asks  neither 
the  why  nor  the  whither  of  his  going;  he  knows  only 
that  he  wants  to  be  in  the  swim.  If,  at  that  moment, 
the  artist  in  Ma^k  Tw^\in  had  had  only  the  tail  of  one 
eye  awake,  he  would  have  iaugVrl  at  the  spectacle  of 
himself  drawing  in  dollars  in  proportion  to  the  mag- 
nificence of  his  noble  and  patriotic  defense  of  what 
everybody  else,  less  nobly  perhaps,  but  no  less  patriot- 
ically, was  defending  also. 

"Frankness  is  a  jewel,"  said  Mark  Twain;  "only 
the  young  can  afford  it."  Precisely  at  the  moment 
when  he  was  writing  to  Robert  Ingersoll  that  remark- 
able letter  which  displayed  a  thirst  for  crude  atheism 
comparable  only  to  the  thirst  for  crude  alcohol  of  a 
man  who  has  been  too  long  deprived  of  his  normal 
ration  of  simple  beer,  he  was  at  work  on  "Tom  Saw- 
yer." "It  is  not  a  boys'  book,  at  all,"  he  says.  "It 
will  only  be  read  by  adults.  It  is  only  written  for 
adults."  Six  months  later  we  find  him  adding:  "I 
finally  concluded  to  cut  the  Sunday  School  speech  down 
to  the  first  two  sentences,  leaving  no  suggestion  of 
satire,  since  the  book  is  to  be  for  boys  and  girls. ' '  Tell 
the  truth  or  trump — but  get  the  trick! 

Almost  incredible,  in  fact,  to  any  one  who  is  familiar 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      237 

with  the  normal  processes  of  the  literary  mind,  was 
Mark  Twain's  fear  of  public  opinion,  that  fear  which 
was  the  complement  of  his  prevailing  desire  for  success 
and  prestige.  In  later  life  it  was  his  regular  habit  to 
write  two  letters,  one  of  which  he  suppressed,  when  he 
was  addressing  any  one  who  was  not  an  intimate  friend 
upon  any  subject  about  which  his  instinctive  feelings 
clashed  with  the  popular  view.  These  unmailed  letters 
in  which,  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "he  had  let  himself  go 
merely  to  relieve  his  feelings  and  to  restore  his  spiritual 
balance,"  accumulated  in  such  a  remarkable  way  that 
finally,  as  if  he  were  about  to  publish  them,  Mark  Twain 
for  his  own  amusement  wrote  an  introduction  to  the 
collection.  "Will  anybody  contend,"  he  says,  "that  a 
man  can  say  to  such  masterful  anger  as  that,  Go,  and 
be  obeyed  ?  .  .  .  He  is  not  to  mail  this  letter ;  he  under- 
stands that,  and  so  he  can  turn  on  the  whole  volume 
of  his  wrath;  there  is  no  harm.  He  is  only  writing  it 
to  get  the  bile  out.  So  to  speak,  he  is  a  volcano ;  imagin- 
ing himself  erupting  does  no  good;  he  must  open  up 
his  crater  and  pour  out  in  reality  his  intolerable  charge 
of  lava  if  he  would  get  relief.  .  .  .  Sometimes  the  load 
is  so  hot  and  so  great  that  one  writes  as  many  as  three 
letters  before  he  gets  down  to  a  mailable  one;  a  very 
angry  one,  a  less  angry  one,  and  an  argumentative  one 
with  hot  embers  in  it  here  and  there." 

Tragic  Mark  Twain !  Irresponsible  child  that  he  is, 
he  does  not  even  ask  himself  whether  he  is  doing  right 
or  wrong,  so  uiiquestioningly  has  he  accepted  the  code 
of  his  wife  and  his  friends.  That  superb  passion,  the 
priceless  passion  of  the  satirist,  is  simply  being  wasted, 
like  the  accumulated  steam  from  an  engine  whose 
machinery  has  broken  down  and  cannot  employ  it. 

Turn  to  one  of  these  occasions  when  the  charge  of 
lava  boiled  up  in  Mark  Twain ;  compare  the  two  unsent 
messages  he  wrote  and  the  message  he  finally  sent  to 
Colonel  George  Harvey  when  the  latter  invited  him  to 


238     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

dine  with  the  Russian  emissaries  to  the  Portsmouth  Con- 
ference in  1905.  To  understand  them  we  must  recall 
Mark  Twain's  opinion  that  the  premature  end  of  the 
Eusso-Japanese  War  was  "entitled  to  rank  as  the  most 
conspicuous  disaster  in  political  history."  Feeling,  as 
he  did,  that  if  the  war  had  lasted  a  month  longer  the 
Russian  autocracy  would  have  fallen,  he  was  bitterly 
opposed  to  the  conference  that  had  been  arranged  by 
Roosevelt.  Here  are  the  two  telegrams  he  did  not  send : 

To  COLONEL  HARVEY. — I  am  still  a  cripple,  otherwise  I  should 
be  more  than  glad  of  this  opportunity  to  meet  those  illustrious 
magicians  who  with  the  pen  have  annulled,  obliterated  and  abol- 
ished every  high  achievement  of  the  Japanese  sword  and  turned 
the  tragedy  of  a  tremendous  war  into  a  gay  and  blithesome  com- 
edy. If  I  may,  let  me  in  all  respect  and  honor  salute  them  as 
my  fellow-humorists,  I  taking  third  place,  as  becomes  one  who 
was  not  born  to  modesty,  but  by  diligence  and  hard  work  is 
acquiring  it.  MARK. 

DEAR  COLONEL — No,  this  is  a  love-feast;  when  you  call  a  lodge 
of  sorrow  send  for  me.  MARK. 

And  this  is  the  telegram  he  sent,  which  pleased  Count 
Witte  so  much  that  he  announced  he  was  going  to  show 
it  to  the  Czar : 

To  COLONEL  HARVEY. — I  am  still  a  cripple,  otherwise  I  should 
be  more  than  glad  of  this  opportunity  to  meet  the  illustrious 
magicians  who  came  here  equipped  with  nothing  but  a  pen,  and 
with  it  have  divided  the  honors  of  the  war  with  the  sword.  It  is 
fair  to  presume  that  in  thirty  centuries  history  will  not  get  done 
admiring  these  men  who  attempted  what  the  world  regarded  as 
impossible  and  achieved  it.  MARK  TWAIN. 

Another  example.  In  1905  he  wrote  a  "War  Prayer," 
a  bitterly  powerful  fragment  of  concentrated  satire. 
Hear  what  Mr.  Paine  says  about  it:  "To  Dan  Beard, 
who  dropped  in  to  see  him,  Clemens  read  the  'War 
Prayer,'  stating  that  he  had  read  it  to  his  daughter 
Jean,  and  others,  who  had  told  him  he  must  not  print 
it,  for  it  would  be  regarded  as  sacrilege.  'Still  you  are 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      239 

going  to  publish  it,  are  you  not?'  Clemens,  pacing  up 
and  down  the  room  in  his  dressing-gown  and  slippers, 
shook  his  head.  'No/  he  said.  'I  have  told  the  whole 
truth  in  that,  and  only  dead  men  can  tell  the  truth  in 
this  world.  It  can  be  published  after  I  am  dead.'  He 
did  not  care,"  adds  Mr.  Paine,  "to  invite  the  public 
verdict  that  he  was  a  lunatic,  or  even  a  fanatic  with 
a  mission  to  destroy  the  illusions  and  traditions  and 
conclusions  of  mankind. ' '  The  conclusions  of  mankind ! 
And  Mark  Twain  was  a  contemporary  of  William 
James!  There  was  nothing  in  this  prayer  that  any 
European  writer  would  have  hesitated  for  a  moment  to 
print.  Well,  "I  have  a  family  to  support,"  wrote  this 
incorrigible  playboy,  who  was  always  ready  to  blow 
thirty  or  forty  thousand  dollars  up  the  chimney  of  some 
new  mechanical  invention.  ' '  I  have  a  family  to  support, 
and  I  can't  afford  this  kind  of  dissipation." 

Finally,  there  was  the  famous  episode  of  the  Gorky 
dinner.  Mark  Twain  was  always  solicitous  for  the  Rus- 
sian people;  he  wrote  stinging  rebukes  to  the  Czar, 
rebukes  in  the  Swinburnian  manner  but  informed  with 
a  far  more  genuine  passion;  he  dreamed  of  a  great 
revolution  in  Russia ;  he  was  always  ready  to  work  for 
it.  When,  therefore,  Maxim  Gorky  came  to  America 
to  collect  funds  for  this  purpose,  Mark  Twain  gladly 
offered  his  aid.  Presently,  however,  it  became  known 
that  Gorky  had  brought  with  him  a  woman  without 
benefit  of  clergy:  hotel  after  hotel,  with  all  the  pious 
wrath  that  is  so  admirably  characteristic  of  Broadway, 
turned  them  into  the  street.  Did  Mark  Twain  hesitate 
even  for  a  moment  ?  Did  anything  stir  in  his  conscience  ? 
Did  it  occur  to  him  that  great  fame  and  position  carry 
with  them  a  certain  obligation,  that  it  is  the  business 
of  leaders  to  prevent  great  public  issues  from  being 
swamped  in  petty,  personal  ones  ?  Apparently  not.  The 
authors'  dinner,  organized  in  Gorky's  honor,  was 
hastily,  and  with  Mark  Twain's  consent,  abandoned. 


240    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

"An  army  of  reporters,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "was  chasing 
Clemens  and  Ho  wells,"  who  appear  on  that  page  for  all 
the  world  like  a  pair  of  terrified  children.  "The  Rus- 
sian revolution  was  entirely  forgotten  in  this  more 
lively,  more  intimate  domestic  interest."  "What  was 
Mark  Twain's  own  comment  on  the  affair?  "Laws,"  he 
wrote,  in  a  private  memorandum,  "can  be  evaded  and 
punishment  escaped,  but  an  openly  transgressed  custom 
brings  sure  punishment.  The  penalty  may  be  unfair, 
unrighteous,  illogical,  and  a  cruelty;  no  matter,  it  will 
be  inflicted  just  the  same.  .  .  .  The  efforts  which  have 
been  made  in  Gorky's  justification  are  entitled  to  all 
respect  because  of  the  magnanimity  of  the  motive  back 
of  them,  but  I  think  that  the  ink  was  wasted.  Custom 
is  custom ;  it  is  built  of  brass,  boiler-iron,  granite ;  facts, 
reasonings,  arguments  have  no  more  effect  upon  it  than 
the  idle  winds  have  upon  Gibraltar."  "What  would 
Emerson  or  Thoreau  have  said,  fifty  years  before,  of* 
such  an  argument,  such  an  assertion  of  the  futility  of 
the  individual  reason  in  the  face  of  "brass,  boiler-iron, 
granite"  and  mob-emotion?  It  is  perhaps  the  most 
pitifully  abject  confession  ever  written  by  a  famous 
writer. 

This  is  what  became  of  the  great  American  satirist, 
the  Voltaire,  the  Swift,  the  Rabelais  of  the  Gilded  Age. 
If  the  real  prophet  is  he  who  attacks  the  stultifying 
illusions  of  mankind,  nothing,  on  the  other  hand,  makes 
one  so  popular  as  to  be  the  moral  denouncer  of  what 
everybody  else  denounces.  Of  the  real  and  difficult 
evils  of  society  Mark  Twain,  to  be  sure,  knew  little.  He 
attacked  monarchy,  yes;  but  monarchy  was  already  an 
obsolescent  evil,  and  in  any  case  this  man  who  took 
such  delight  in  "walking  with  kings,"  as  the  advertise- 
ments say,  in  actual  life,  never  attacked  the  one  monarch 
who  really  was,  as  it  appeared,  secure  in  his  seat,  the 
Kaiser.  He  attacked  monarchy  because,  as  he  said,  it 
was  an  eternal  denial  of  "the  numerical  mass  of  the 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      241 

nation."  He  had  become,  in  fact,  the  incarnation  of 
that  numerical  mass,  the  majority,  which,  in  the  face 
of  all  his  personal  impulses,  he  could  not  consider  as 
anything  but  invariably  right.  He  could  not  be  the 
spokesman  of  the  immensities  and  the  eternities,  as 
Carlyle  had  been,  for  he  knew  them  not;  he  could  not 
be,  like  Anatole  France,  the  spokesman  of  justice,  for 
indeed  he  had  no  ideal.  His  only  criterion  was  personal, 
and  that  was  determined  by  his  friends.  "On  the 
whole,"  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "Clemens  wrote  his  stric- 
tures more  for  relief  than  to  print,"  and  when  he 
printed  them  it  was  because  he  had  public  opinion 
behind  him.  Revolt  as  he  might,  and  he  never  ceased 
to  revolt,  he  was  the  same  man  who,  at  the  psychological 
moment,  in  "The  Innocents  Abroad,"  by  disparaging 
Europe  and  its  art  and  its  glamorous  past,  by  disparag 
ing,  in  short,  the  history  of  the  human  spirit,  had 
nattered  the  expanding  impulse  of  industrial  America. 
In  the  face  of  his  own  genius,  in  the  face  of  his  own 
essential  desire,  he  had  pampered  for  a  whole  genera- 
tion that  national  self-complacency  which  Matthew 
Arnold  quite  accurately  described  as  vulgar,  and  not 
only  vulgar  but  retarding. 

Glance  at  those  last  melancholy  satirical  fragments  he 
wrote  in  his  old  age,  those  fragments  which  he  never 
published,  which  he  never  even  cared  to  finish,  but  a 
few  paragraphs  of  which  appear  in  Mr.  Paine 's  biog- 
raphy. "We  note  in  them  all  the  gestures  of  the  great 
unfulfilled  satirist  he  was  meant  to  be;  but  they  are 
empty  gestures;  only  an  impotent  anger  informs  them; 
Mark  Twain's  preoccupations  are  those  merely  of  a 
bitter  and  disillusioned  child.  He  wishes  to  take  ven- 
geance upon  the  Jehovah  of  the  Presbyterians  to  whom 
his  wife  has  obliged  him  to  pay  homage ;  but  the 
Jehovah  of  the  Presbyterians,  alas!  no  longer  interests 
humanity.  He  is  beset  by  all  the  theological  obsessions 
of  his  childhood  in  Missouri;  he  has  never  even  read 


242     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

"Literature  and  Dogma";  he  does  not  know  that  the 
morbid  fears  of  that  old  Western  village  of  his  have 
ceased  to  trouble  the  moral  conscience  of  the  world; 
he  imagines  that  he  can  still  horrify  us  with  his  anti- 
quated blasphemies.  He  has  lived  completely  insulated 
from  all  the  real  currents  of  thought  in  his  generation. 
"The  human  being,"  he  says,  in  one  of  his  notes,  "needs 
to  revise  his  ideas  again  about  God.  Most  of  the  scien- 
tists have  done  it  already,  but  most  of  them  don't  care 
to  say  so."  He  imagines,  we  see,  that  all  the  scientists 
have,  like  himself,  lived  in  Hartford  and  Elmira  and 
married  ladies  like  Mrs.  Clemens;  and  as,  according 
to  Mr.  Paine,  nobody  ever  dared  to  contradict  him  or 
tell  him  anything,  he  never,  dazzled  as  he  was  by  his 
own  fame,  discovered  his  mistake.  ' '  The  religious  folly 
you  were  born  in  you  will  die  in."  he  wrote  once:  he 
meant  that  he  had  never  himself  faced  anything  out. 
Was  he,  or  wasn  't  he,  a  Presbyterian  ?  He  really  never 
knew.  If  he  had  matured,  those  theological  preoccupa- 
tions, constantly  imaged  in  his  jokes  and  anecdotes 
about  heaven,  hell  and  St.  Peter,  would  have  simply 
dropped  away  from  his  mind:  his  inability  to  express 
them  had  fixed  them  there  and  his  environment  kept  him 
constantly  reacting  against  them  to  the  end.  Think  of 
those  chapters  in  his  Autobiography  which  he  said  were 
"going  to  make  people's  hair  curl."  Several  of  them, 
at  least,  we  are  told,  dealt  with  infant  damnation;  but 
whose  hair,  in  this  twentieth  century,  is  going  to  curl 
over  infant  damnation  ?  How  little  he  had  observed  the 
real  changes  in  public  opinion,  this  man  who  lived, 
instinctively,  all  his  life  long,  in  the  atmosphere  of  the 
Western  Sunday  School!  "To-morrow,"  he  tells  Mr. 
Paine,  in  1906,  "I  mean  to  dictate  a  chapter  which  will 
get  my  heirs  and  assigns  burnt  alive  if  they  venture  to 
print  it  this  side  of  A.  D.  2006 — which  I  judge  they 
•won't";  and  what  he  dictates  is  an  indictment  of  the 
orthodox  God.  He  often  spoke  of  "the  edition  of  A.  D. 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      243 

2006,"  saying  that  it  would  "make  a  stir  when  it  comes 
out,"  and  even  went  so  far,  as  we  have  seen,  as  to 
negotiate  for  the  publication  of  his  memoirs  one  hun- 
dred years  after  his  death.  He  might  have  spared  him- 
self the  trepidation.  It  is  probable  that  by  1975  those 
memoirs  will  seem  to  the  publishing  world  a  very  doubt- 
ful commercial  risk. 

Mark  Twain's  view  of  man,  in  short,  was  quite  rudi- 
mentary. He  considered  life  a  mistake  and  the  human 
animal  the  contemptible  machine  he  had  found  him: 
that  argues  the  profundity  of  his  own  temperament,  the 
depth  and  magnitude  of  his  own  tragedy,  but  it  argues 
little  else.  The  absurdity  of  man  consisted,  in  Mark 
Twain's  eyes,  in  his  ridiculous  conception  of  heaven  and 
his  conceit  in  believing  himself  the  Creator's  pet.  But 
surely  those  are  not  the  significant  absurdities.  "His 
heaven  is  like  himself :  strange,  interesting,  astonishing, 
grotesque,"  he  wrote  in  one  of  those  pseudo-Swiftian 
"Letters  from  the  Earth,"  which  he  dictated  with  such 
fervor  to  Mr.  Paine.  "I  give  you  my  word  it  has  not 
a  single  feature  in  it  that  he  actually  values.  It  consists 
— utterly  and  entirely — of  diversions  which  he  cares 
next  to  nothing  about  here  on  the  earth,  yet  he  is  quite 
sure  he  will  like  in  heaven.  .  .  .  Most  men  do  not  sing, 
most  men  cannot  sing,  most  men  will  not  stay  where 
others  are  singing  if  it  be  continued  more  than  two 
hours.  Note  that.  Only  about  two  men  in  a  hundred 
can  play  upon  a  musical  instrument,  and  not  four  in  a 
hundred  have  any  wish  to  learn  how.  Set  that  down. 
Many  men  pray,  not  many  of  them  like  to  do  it.  ... 
All  people,  sane  or  insane,  like  to  have  variety  in  their 
lives.  Monotony  quickly  wearies  them.  Now,  then,  you 
have  the  facts.  You  know  what  men  don't  enjoy.  Well, 
they  have  invented  a  heaven,  out  of  their  own  heads,  all 
by  themselves ;  guess  what  it  is  like  ? ' '  How  far  does  that 
satirical  gesture  carry  us?  It  is  too  rustically  simple 
in  its  animus,  and  its  presuppositions  about  the  tastes. 


/244    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

of  humanity  are  quite  erroneous:  to  sing,  to  play  and 
to  pray,  in  some  fashion  or  other,  are  universal,  admir- 
able and  permanent  impulses  in  man.  What  is  the 
moral  even  of  that  marvelous  Odyssey  of  "Huckleberry 
Finn"?  That  all  civilization  is  inevitably  a  "hateful 
error,  something  that  stands  in  the  way  of  life  and 
thwarts  it  as  the  civilization  of  the  Gilded  Age  had 
thwarted  Mark  Twain.  But  that  is  the  illusion,  or  the 
disillusion,  of  a  man  who  has  never  really  known  what 
civilization  is,  who,  in  "The  Stolen  AVhite  Elephant," 
like  H.  G.  Wells  in  his  early  tales,  delights  in  the  spec- 
tacle of  a  general  smash-up  of  a  world  which  he  cannot 
imagine  as  worth  saving  because  he  has  only  seen  it 
as  a  fool's  paradise.  What  is  the  philosophy  of  "The 
Man  That  Corrupted  Hadleyburg"?  "That  every  man 
is  strong,"  as  Mr.  Paine  says,  "until  his  price  is 
named."  But  that  is  not  true,  to  the  discriminating 
sense,  at  all.  It  is  an  army  of  fifty-two  boys  that  the 
Connecticut  Yankee  collects  in  order  to  start  the  Eng- 
lish republic:  in  childhood,  and  childhood  alone,  in 
short,  had  Mark  Twain  ever  perceived  the  vaunted 
nobility  of  the  race.  The  victim  of  an  arrested  develop- 
ment, the  victim  of  a  social  order  which  had  given  him 
no  general  sense  of  the  facts  of  life  and  no  sense  what- 
ever of  its  possibilities,  he  poured  vitriol  promiscuously 
over  the  whole  human  scene.  But  that  is  not  satire: 
that  is  pathology. 

Mark  Twain 's  imagination  was  gigantesque :  his  eye, 
in  later  life,  was  always  looking  through  the  small  end 
or  the  large  end  of  a  telescope ;  he  oscillated  between  the 
posture  of  Gulliver  in  Lilliput  and  the  posture  of  Gul- 
liver in  Brobdingnag.  That  natural  tendency  toward  a 
magnification  or  a  minification  of  things  human  is  one 
of  the  ear-marks  of  the  satirist.  In  order  to  be  effectual, 
however,  it  requires  a  measure,  an  ideal  norm,  which 
Mark  Twain,  with  his  rudimentary  sense  of  proportion, 
never  attained.  It  was  not  fear  alone  then,  but  an 


Let  Somebody  Else  Begin      245 

artistic  sense  also  that  led  him  to  suppress,  and  indeed 
to  leave  incomplete,  most  of  the  works  in  which  this 
tendency  manifested  itself.  One  recalls  his  "3000 
Years  Among  the  Microbes,"  passages  of  which  have 
been  published  by  Mr.  Paine.  Glance  at  another  ex- 
ample. "I  have  imagined,"  he  said  once,  "a  man  three 
thousand  miles  high  picking  up  a  ball  like  the  earth  and 
looking  at  it  and  holding  it  in  his  hand.  It  would  be 
about  like  a  billiard-ball  to  him,  and  he  would  turn  it 
over  in  his  hand  and  rub  it  with  his  thumb,  and  where 
he  rubbed  over  the  mountain  ranges  he  might  say, 
'There  seems  to  be  some  slight  roughness  here,  but  I 
can't  detect  it  with  my  eye;  it  seems  perfectly  smooth 
to  look  at. '  "  There  we  have  the  Swif tian,  the  Rabelais- 
ian note,  the  Rabelaisian  frame  for  the  picture  that 
fails  to  emerge.  The  fancy  exists  in  his  mind,  but  he  is 
able  to  do  nothing  with  it :  all  he  can  do  is  to  express 
a  simple  contempt,  to  rule  human  life  as  it  were  out  of 
court.  Mark  Twain  never  completed  these  fancies  pre- 
cisely, one  can  only  suppose,  because  they  invariably 
led  into  this  cul-de-sac.  If  life  is  really  futile,  then 
writing  is  futile  also.  The  true  satirist,  however  futile 
he  may  make  life  seem,  never  really  believes  it  futile : 
his  interest  in  its  futility  is  itself  a  desperate  registra- 
tion of  some  instinctive  belief  that  it  might  be,  that  it 
could  be,  full  of  significance,  that,  in  fact,  it  is  full  of 
significance :  to  him  what  makes  things  petty  is  an  ever- 
present  sense  of  their  latent  grandeur.  That  sense  Mark 
Twain  had  never  attained:  in  consequence,  his  satirical 
gestures  remained  mere  passes  in  the  air. 


CHAPTER  XI 

MUSTERED  OUT 

"...  a  man  who  awoke  too  early  in  the  darkness,  while  the 
others  were  all  still  asleep."  DMITRI  MEEEJKOWSKI. 

AND  so  we  come  to  Mark  Twain's  last  phase,  to  that 
hour  when,  outwardly  liberated  at  last  from  the 
bonds  and  the  taboos  that  have  ^thwarted  him  and  dis- 
torted him,  he  turns  and  rends  the  world  in  the  bitter- 
ness of  his  defeat. 

"Three  score  years  and  ten!"  he  said  in  that  famous 
seventieth  birthday  speech.  "It  is  the  scriptural  statute 
of  limitations.  After  that  you  owe  no  active  duties; 
for  you  the  strenuous  life  is  over.  You  are  a  time- 
expired  man,  to  use  Kipling's  military  phrase:  you 
have  served  your  term,  well  or  less  well,  and  you  are 
mustered  out." 

What  a  conception  of  the  literary  career!  You 
see  how  he  looks  back  upon  his  life? 

"A  pilot  in  those  days,"  he  had  written  in  "Life  on 
the  Mississippi,"  "was  the  only  unfettered  and  entirely 
independent  human  being  that  lived  in  the  earth.  .  .  „ 
Writers  of  all  kinds  are  manacled  servants  of  the  public. 
We  write  frankly  and  fearlessly,  but  then  we  'modify' 
before  we  print.  In  truth,  every  man  and  woman  and 
child  has  a  master,  and  worries  and  frets  in  servitude; 
but  in  the  day  I  write  of,  the  Mississippi  pilot  had 
none."  No  wonder  he  had  loved  that  earlier  career  in 
whieh,  for  once  and  once  only,  he  had  enjoyed  the  indis- 
pensable condition  of  the  creative  life.  As  for  the  life 
of  literature,  it  had  been  for  him,  and  he  assumed  that 
246 


Mustered  Out  247 

it  was  for  all,  a  life  of  moral  slavery.  "We  write  frankly 
and  fearlessly,  but  then  we  '  modify '  before  we  print ' ' ! 
Shades  of  Tolstoy  and  Thomas  Carlyle,  of  Nietzsche  and 
Ibsen  and  Whitman,  did  you  ever  hear  such  words  on  the 
lips  of  a  famous  confrere  ?  You,  whose  opinions  were  al- 
ways unpopular,  did  you  ever  once,  in  the  angelic  naivete 
of  your  souls,  conceive  the  quaint  idea  of  modifying  a 
thought  or  a  phrase  because  it  annoyed  some  rich  busi- 
ness man,  some  influential  priest,  some  foolish  woman? 
What  were  their  flagellations,  their  gross  and  petty  pun- 
ishments to  you,  thrice-armored  in  the  inviolate,  imma- 
terial aura  of  your  own  ingenuous  truthfulness,  the  rapt 
contemplation  of  your  noble  dreams!  Look  with  pity, 
then,  out  of  your  immortal  calm,  upon  this  poor  frus- 
trated child  whom  nature  had  destined  to  become  your 
peer  and  who,  a  swan  born^  among  .geese,  .never  even 
found  out  what~aT  swan  was  and  had  to  live  the  goose  T 
life  himself !  Yes,  it  is  true  that  Mark  Twain  had  never 
so  much  as  imagined  the  normal  existence  of  the  artist, 
of  the  writer,  who  writes  to  please  himself  and  by  so 
doing  brings  eternal  joy  to  the  best  of  humanity — to 
whom  old  age,  far  from  being  a  release  from  irksome 
duties,  brings  only,  amid  faltering  forces,  a  fresh  chal- 
lenge to  the  pursuit  of  the  visions  and  the  hopes  of 
youth.  "You  are  a  time-expired  man,  to  use  Kipling's 
military  phrase;  you  have  served  your  term"!  It  is  in 
the  language  of  the  barracks,  of  the  prison,  of  an  alien 
discipline  at  last  escaped  that  Mark  Twain  thinks  of 
the  writer's  life.  "And  you  are  mustered  out." 

His  first  breathless  thought  was  to  "tell  the  truth" 
at  last.  Seventy  years,  he  said  again,  is  "the  time  of 
life  when  you  arrive  at  a  new  and  awful  dignity ;  when 
you  may  throw  aside  the  decent  reserves  which  have 
oppressed  you  for  a  generation,  and  stand  unafraid 
and  unabashed  upon  your  seven-terraced  summit  and 
look  down  and  teach  unrebuked."  Huck  Finn,  escap- 
ing from  an  unusually  long  and  disagreeable  session 


248     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

with  Aunt  Polly — that  is  the  posture  of  Mark  Twain, 
seventy  years  young,  in  this  moment  of  release,  of  re- 
lief, of  an  abandon  which,  with  time,  has  become  filled 
with  sober  thoughts.  To  teach,  unrebuked,  unabashed, 
unafraid.  Mr.  Howells,  referring  to  this  period,  speaks 
of  "a  constant  growth  in  the  direction  of  something 
like  recognized  authority  in  matters  of  public  import": 
Mark  Twain  was,  indeed,  accepted  as  a  sort  of  national 
sage.  But  how  is  it  possible  for  any  one  who  reads  his 
speeches  now,  removed  from  that  magnetic  presence  of 
his,  to  feel  that  he  played  this  role  in  any  distinguished 
way?  Was  he  really  the  seer,  the  clairvoyant  public 
counsellor?  He  had  learned  to  look  with  a  certain  per- 
spective upon  what  he  came  to  call  "this  great  big 
ignorant  nation ' ' :  the  habitude  of  such  power  as  he 
possessed,  such  experience  of  the  world  as  he  had  had — 
and  they  were  great  in  their  way — showed  him  how 
absurd  it  was  to  spread  the  eagle  any  longer.  There 
is  something  decidedly  fresh  and  strong  about  those 
speeches  still.  He  scouted  the  fatuous  nonsense  about 
"American  ideals"  that  becomes  more  and  more  vocal 
the  more  closely  the  one  American  ideal  of  "all  the 
people"  approaches  the  vanishing-point.  Good,  sharp, 
honest  advice  he  offered  in  abundance  upon  the  primi^ 
tive  decencies  of  citizenship  in  this  America,  ' '  the  refuge 
of  the  oppressed  from  everywhere  (who  can  pay  fifty 
dollars  admission) — any  one  except  a  Chinaman."  Was 
he  not  courageous,  indeed,  this  "general  spokesman" 
of  the  epoch  of  Bishop  Potter  and  Mrs.  Potter  Palmer  ? 
He  who  said,  "Do  right  and  you  will  be  conspicuous," 
was  the  first  to  realize  that  his  courage  was  of  the  sort 
that  costs  one  little.  That  passion  for  the  limelight,  that 
inordinate  desire  for  'approval  was  a  sufficient"  earnest 
that  he  could  not,  even  if  he  had  so  desired,  do  anything 
essentially  unpopular.  It  was  no  accident,  therefore, 
that  his  mind  was  always  drifting  back  to  that  famous 
watermelon  story  which  tens  of  thousands  of  living 


Mustered  Out  249 

Americans  have  heard  him  tell:  it  appears  three  times 
in  his  published  speeches.  He  told  how  as  a  boy  he  had 
stolen  a  watermelon  and,  having  opened  it  and  found 
it  green,  returned  it  to  the  farmer  with  a  lecture  on 
honesty;  whereupon,  he  was  rewarded  with  the  gift  of 
another  watermelon  that  was  ripe.  It  was  the  symbol 
of  his  own  career,  for  his  courage,  and  he  frankly 
admitted  it,  had  always  been  the  sort  of  courage  he 
described  in  his  story  "Luck." 

"Tell  the  truth,"  in  short,  he  could  not;  his  life  had 
given  him  so  little  truth  to  tell.  His  seventieth  birthday 
had  left  him  free  to  speak  out;  and  yet,  just  as  he 
"played  safe"  as  a  public  sage,  so  also  he  continued  to 
play  safe  as  a  writer.  "Am  I  honest?"  he  wrote  in 
that  same  seventy-first  year  to  Twitchell.  "I  give  you 
my  word  of  honor  (privately)  I  am  not.  For  seven 
years  I  have  suppressed  a  book  which  my  conscience 
tells  me  I  ought  to  publish.  I  hold  it  a  duty  to  publish 
it.  There  are  other  difficult  duties  which  I  am  equal 
to,  but  I  am  not  equal  to  that  one. ' '  It  was  his  ' '  Bible ' ' 
-"What  Is  Man?" — which,  as  he  had  said  some  years 
before,  "Mrs.  Clemens  loathes,  and  shudders  over,  and 
will  not  listen  to  the  last  half  nor  allow  me  to  print  any 
part  of  it."  Did  he  publish  it  at  last?  Yes,  anony- 
mously; and  from  that  final  compromise  we  can  see 
that  his  "mustering  out"  had  come  too  late.  He  could 
not  rouse  himself,  indeed,  from  the  inertia  with  which 
old  age  and  long  habits  of  easy  living  had  fortified  the 
successful  half  of  his  double  personality.  Tolstoy,  at 
eighty,  set  out  on  a  tragic  pilgrimage  to  redeem  in  his 
own  eyes  a  life  that  had  been  compromised  by  wealth 
and  comfort :  but  the  poet  in  Tolstoy  had  never  slum- 
bered nor  slept!  It  had  kept  the  conflict  conscious,  it 
had  registered  its  protest,  not  sporadically  but  every 
day,  day  in,  day  out,  by  act  and  thought ;  it  had  kept 
its  right  of  way  open.  Mark  Twain  had  lived  too  fully 
the  life  of  the  world;  the  average  sensual  man  had 


250    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

engulfed  the  poet.  Like  an  old  imprisoned  revolutionist 
it  faced  the  gates  of  a  freedom  too  long  deferred.  What 
visions  of  revolt  had  thrilled  it  in  earlier  years !  How  it 
had  shaken  its  bars!  But  now  the  sunlight  was  so 
sweet,  the  run  of  a  little  sap  along  those  palsied  limbs. 
On  his  seventieth  birthday  Mark  Twain  was  dazzled  by 
his  liberty.  He  was  going  to  tell  the  world  the  truth, 
the  whole  truth,  and  a  little  more  than  the  truth! 
Within  a  week  he  found  that  he  no  longer  had  the 
strength. 

Glance  at  Mr.  Paine 's  record.  In  1899,  we  find  him 
writing  as  follows  to  Mr.  Howells:  "For  several  years 
I  have  been  intending  to  stop  writing  for  print  as  soon 
as  I  could  afford  it.  At  last  I  can  afford  it,  and  have 
put  the  pot-boiler  pen  away.  What  I  have  been  want- 
ing is  a  chance  to  write  a  book  without  reserves — a  book 
which  should  take  account  of  no  one's  feelings,  and  no 
one's  prejudices,  opinions,  beliefs,  hopes,  illusions,  delu- 
sions :  a  book  which  should  say  my  say,  right  out  of  my 
heart,  in  the  plainest  language  and  without  a  limitation 
of  any  sort.  I  judged  that  that  would  be  an  unimagin- 
able luxury,  heaven  on  earth.  It  is  under  way,  now, 
and  it  is  a  luxury!  an  intellectual  drunk."  The  book 
was  "The  Mysterious  Stranger."  While  he  was  under 
the  spell  of  composing  it,  that  sulphurous  little  fairy 
tale  seemed  to  him  the  fruition  of  his  desire.  But  he 
was  inhibited  from  publishing  it  and  this  only  poured 
oil  upon  the  passion  that  possessed  him.  At  once  this 
craving  reasserted  itself  with  tenfold  intensity.  He 
tinkered  incessantly  at  "What  Is  Man?"  He  wrote  it 
and  rewrote  it,  he  read  it  to  his  visitors,  he  told  his 
friends  about  it.  Eventually  he  published  this,  but  the 
fact  that  he  felt  he  was  obliged  to  do  so  anonymously 
fanned  his  insatiable  desire  still  more.  Something  more 
personal  he  must  write  now !  He  fixed  his  mind  on  that 
with  a  consuming  intensity.  To  express  himself  was  no 
longer  a  mere  artistic  impulse;  it  had  become  a  cate- 


Mustered  Out  251 

gorical  imperative,  a  path  out  of  what  was  for  him  a 
life  of  sin.  "With  all  my  practice,"  he  writes,  humor- 
ously, in  one  of  his  letters,  "I  realize  that  in  a  sudden 
emergency  I  am  but  a  poor,  clumsy  liar."  There  is 
nothing  humorous,  however,  in  that  refusal  of  his  to 
continue  Tom  Sawyer's  story  into  later  life  because  he 
would  only  "lie  like  all  the  other  one-horse  men  in 
literature  and  the  reader  would  conceive  a  hearty  con- 
tempt for  him":  there  he  expressed  all  the  anguish  of 
his  own  soul.  To  tell  the  truth  now!  What  truth? 
Any  and  every  kind  of  truth — anything  that  it  would 
hurt  him  to  tell  and  by  so  doing  purge  him !  We  recall 
how  he  had  adored  the  frankness  of  Robert  Ingersoll, 
how  he  had  kept  urging  his  brother  Orion  to  write  an 
autobiography  that  would  spare  nobody's  feelings  and 
would  let  all  the  cats  out  of  the  bag :  ' '  Simply  tell  your 
story  to  yourself,  laying  all  hideousness  utterly  bare, 
reserving  nothing,"  he  had  told  him.  Let  Orion  do  it! 
we  can  almost  hear  him  whispering  to  himself;  and 
Orion  had  done  it.  "It  wrung  my  heart,"  wrote  Mr. 
Ho  wells  of  that  astounding  manuscript,  "and  I  felt 
haggard  after  I  had  finished  it.  The  writer's  soul  is 
laid  bare;  it  is  shocking."  Mark  Twain  had  found  a 
vicarious  satisfaction  in  that,  he  who  at  the  same  mo- 
ment was  himself  attempting  to  write  "an  absolutely 
faithful  autobiography,"  as  Mr.  Paine  tells  us,  "a  docu- 
ment in  which  his  deeds  and  misdeeds,  even  his  moods 
and  inmost  thoughts,  should  be  truly  set  down."  To 
write  such  a  book  now  had  become  the  ruling  desire  of 
his  life.  He  had  developed  what  Mr.  Paine  calls  "a 
passion  for  biography,  and  especially  for  autobiography, 
diaries,  letters,  and  such  intimate  human  history" — for 
confessions,  in  a  word.  He  longed  now  not  to  reform 
the  world  but  to  redeem  himself.  "Writing  for  print!" 
• — he  speaks  of  that  as  of  something  unthinkable.  A 
man  who  writes  for  print,  he  seems  to  say,  this  man  who 
spoke  of  free  speech  as  the  "Privilege  of  the  Grave," 


252     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

becomes  a  liar  in  the  mere  act.  He  is  afraid  of  the 
public,  but  he  is  more  afraid  now  of  himself,  whom  he 
cannot  trust.  He  wishes  to  write  "not  to  be  read," 
and  plans  a  series  of  letters  to  his  friends  that  are  not 
going  to  be  mailed.  "You  can  talk  with  a  quite  unallow- 
able frankness  and  freedom,"  he  tells  himself,  in  a 
little  note  which  Mr.  Paine  has  published,  "because  you 
are  not  going  to  send  the  letter.  When  you  are  on  fire 
with  theology  you'll  not  '  write  it  to  Rogers,  who 
wouldn't  be  an  inspiration;  you'll  write  it  to  Twitchell, 
because  it  will  make  him  writhe  and  squirm  and  break 
the  furniture.  When  you  are  on  fire  with  a  good  thing 
that's  indecent  you  won't  waste  it  on  Twitchell;  you'll 
save  it  for  Howells,  who  will  love  it.  As  he  will  never 
see  it  you  can  make  it  really  indecenter  than  he  could 
stand;  and  so  no  harm  is  done,  yet  a  vast  advantage  is 
gained."  Was  ever  a  more  terrible  flood  piled  up 
against  the  sluice-gates  of  a  human  soul? 

At  last  the  gates  open.  Safely  seated  behind  a  proviso 
that  it  is  not  to  be  published  until  he  has  been  dead  a 
century,  Mark  Twain  begins  his  autobiography.  In  the 
first  flush  he  imagines  that  he  is  doing  what  he  has 
longed  to  do.  "Work?"  he  said  to  a  young  reporter — 
the  passage  is  to  be  found  in  the  collection  of  his 
speeches.  "I  retired  from  work  on  my  seventieth  birth- 
day. Since  then  I  have  been  putting  in  merely  twenty- 
six  hours  a  day  dictating  my  autobiography.  .  .  .  But 
it  is  not  to  be  published  in  full  until  I  am  thoroughly 
dead:  I  have  made  it  as  caustic,  fiendish  and  devilish 
as  possible.  It  will  fill  many  volumes,  and  I  shall  con- 
tinue writing  it  until  the  time  comes  for  me  to  join  the 
angels.  It  is  going  to  be  a  terrible  autobiography.  It  will 
make  the  hair  of  some  folks  curl.  But  it  cannot  be  pub- 
lished until  I  am  dead,  and  the  persons  mentioned  in  it 
and  their  children  and  grandchildren  are  dead.  It  is 
something  awful." 

You  see  what  he  has  in  mind.    For  twenty  years  his 


Mustered  Out  253 

daily  reading  has  been  Pepys  and  Saint-Simon  and 
Casanova.  He  is  going  to  have  a  spree,  a  debauch  of 
absolutely  reckless  confession.  He  is  going  to  tell  things 
about  himself,  he  is  going  to  use  all  the  bold,  bad  words 
that  used  to  shock  his  wife.  His  wife — perhaps  he  is 
even  going  to  be  realistic  about  her.  Why  not?  Has 
he  not  already  in  his  letters  said  two  or  three  "playful" 
things  about  her,  not  incompatible  with  his  affection, 
but  still  decidedly  wanting  in  filial  respect?  Saint 
Andrew  Carnegie  and  Uncle  Joe  Cannon,  his  "affec- 
tionate old  friend"  of  the  copyright  campaign,  are  fair 
game  anyway,  and  so  are  some  of  those  neighbors  in 
Hartford,  and  so  are  Howells  and  Rogers  and  Twitchell. 
He  is  going  to  exact  his  pound  of  flesh  for  every  one  of 
that  "long  list  of  humiliations"!  But  he  is  going  to 
exact  it  like  an  Olympian.  What  is  the  use  of  being 
old  if  you  can't  rise  to  a  certain  impersonality,  a  certain 
universality,  if  you  can 't  assume  at  last  the  prerogatives 
of  the  human  soul,  lost,  in  its  loneliness  and  its  pathos, 
upon  this  little  orb  that  whirls  amid  the  "swimming 
shadows  and  enormous  shapes"  of  time  and  space,  if 
you  can't  expand  and  contract  your  eye  like  the  ghost 
you  are  so  soon  to  be,  if  you  can't  bring  home  for  once 
the  harvest  of  all  your  pains  and  all  your  wisdom?  As 
for  that  "tearing,  booming  nineteenth,  the  mightiest  of 
all  the  centuries" — what  a  humbug  it  was,  so  full  of 
cruelties  and  meannesses  and  lying  hypocrisies!  .  .  . 
What  fun  he  is  going  to  have — what  magnificently 
wicked  fun! 

You  see  Mark  Twain's  intention.  He  is  going  to 
write,  for  his  own  redemption,  the  great  book  that  all 
the  world  is  thirsting  for,  the  book  it  will  gladly,  how- 
ever impatiently,  wait  a  hundred  years  to  read.  And 
what  happens?  "He  found  it,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "a 
pleasant,  lazy  occupation,"  which  prepares  us  for  the 
kind  of  throbbing  truth  we  are  going  to  get.  Twenty- 
six  instalments  of  that  Autobiography  were  published 


254    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

before  he  died  in  the  North  American  Review.  They 
were  carefully  selected,  no  doubt,  not  to  offend:  the 
brimstone  was  held  in  reserve.  But  as  for  the  quality 
of  that  brimstone,  can  we  not  guess  it  in  advance ?  "He 
confessed  freely,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  "that  he  lacked  the 
courage,  even  the  actual  ability,  to  pen  the  words  that 
would  lay  his  soul  bare."  One  paragraph,  in  fact,  that 
found  its  way  into  print  among  the  diffuse  and  super- 
ficial impressions  of  the  North  American  Review  gives 
us,  we  may  assume,  the  measure  of  his  general  candor: 
"I  have  been  dictating  this  autobiography  of  mine  daily 
for  three  months;  I  have  thought  of  fifteen  hundred  or 
two  thousand  incidents  in  my  life  which  I  am  ashamed 
of,  but  I  have  not  gotten  one  of  them  to  consent  to  go 
on  paper  yet.  I  think  that  that  stock  will  still  be 
complete  and  unimpaired  when  I  finish  these  memoirs, 
if  I  ever  finish  them.  I  believe  that  if  I  should  put  in 
all  or  any  of  these  incidents  I  should  be  sure  to  strike 
them  out  when  I  came  to  revise  this  book." 

Bernard  Shaw  once  described  America  as  a  nation  of 
villagers.  Well,  Mark  Twain  had  become  the  Village 
Atheist,  the  captain  of  his  type,  the  Judge  Driscoll  of 
a  whole  continent.  "Judge  Driscoll,"  we  remember, 
"could  be  a  free-thinker  and  still  hold  his  place  in 
society,  because  he  was  the  person  of  most  consequence 
in  the  community,  and  therefore  could  venture  to  go 
his  own  way  and  follow  out  his  own  notions."  Mark 
Twain  had  proved  himself  superlatively  "smart";  he 
was  licensed  to  say  his  say:  what  inhibited  him  now, 
therefore,  even  more  than  his  habits  of  moral  slavery, 
was  a  sense — how  can  we  doubt  it? — a  half -unconscious 
sense  that,  concerning  life  itself,  he  had  little  of  impor- 
tance to  communicate.  His  struggle  of  conscience  over 
the  publication  of  "What  Is  Man?"  points,  it  is  true, 
toward  another  conclusion.  But  certainly  the  writing 
of  his  Autobiography  must  have  shown  him  that  with 
all  the  will  in  the  world,  and  with  the  freedom  of  abso- 


Mustered  Out  255 

lute  privacy,  he  was  incapable  of  the  grand  utterance 
of  the  prophets  and  the  confessors.  There  was  nothing 
to  prevent  him  from  publishing  "3000  Years  Among 
the  Microbes,"  the  design  of  which  was  apparently 
free  from  personalities,  if  he  had  been  sufficiently  inter- 
ested to  finish  it.  He  thought  of  founding  a  School  of 
Philosophy  at  Redding  like  that  other  school  at  Con- 
cord. But  none  of  these  impulses  lasted.  His  prodigious 
"market  value"  confirmed  him  at  moments,  no  doubt, 
in  thinking  himself  a  Nestor ;  but  something  within  this 
tragic  old  man  must  have  told  him  that  he  was  not 
really  the  sage,  the  seer,  and  that  mankind  could  well 
exist  without  the  discoveries  and  the  judgments  of  that 
gregarious  pilgrimage  of  his.  "It  is  noble  to  be  good, ' ' 
he  said,  during  these  later  years,  "but  it  is  nobler  to 
show  others  how  to  be  good,  and  less  trouble,"  which 
conveys,  in  its  cynicism,  a  profound  sense  of  his  own 
emptiness.  He  tempted  the  fates  when  he  published 
"What  Is  Man?"  anonymously.  If  that  book  had  had 
a  success  of  scandal,  his  conscience  might  have  pricked 
him  on  to  publish  more :  immature  as  his  judgment  was, 
he  had  no  precise  knowledge  of  the  value  of  his  ideas; 
but  at  least  he  knew  that  great  ideas  usually  shock  the 
public  and  that  if  his  ideas  were  great  they  would  prob- 
ably have  that  gratifying  effect.  Fortunately  or  unfor- 
tunately, the  book  was  received,  says  Mr.  Paine,  "as 
a  clever,  and  even  brilliant,  expose  of  philosophies 
which  were  no  longer  startlingly  new."  After  that  just, 
that  very  generous  public  verdict — for  the  book  is,  in 
fact,  quite  worthless  except  for  the  light  it  throws  on 
Mark  Twain — he  must  have  felt  that  he  had  no  further 
call  to  adopt  the  unpopular  role  of  a  Mephistopheles. 

With  all  the  more  passion,  however,  his  balked  fury, 
the  animus  of  the  repressed  satirist  in  him,  turned 
against  the  harsher  aspects  of  that  civilization  which 
had  tied  his  tongue.  Automatically,  as  we  have  seen 
from  the  incidents  of  the  Gorky  dinner  and  the  Ports- 


256     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

mouth  Conference  and  the  "War  Prayer,"  restraining 
those  impulses  that  were  not  supported  by  the  sentiment 
of  a  safe  majority,  he  threw  himself,  with  his  warm 
heart  and  his  quick  pulse,  into  the  defense  of  all  that 
are  desolate  and  oppressed.  "The  human  race  was 
behaving  very  badly,"  says  Mr.  Paine,  of  the  hour  of 
his  triumphant  return  to  America  in  1900:  "unspeak- 
able corruption  was  rampant  in  the  city;  the  Boers 
were  being  oppressed  in  South  Africa ;  the  natives  were 
being  murdered  in  the  Philippines ;  Leopold  of  Belgium 
was  massacring  and  mutilating  the  blacks  in  the  Congo ; 
and  the  allied  powers,  in  the  cause  of  Christ,  were 
slaughtering  the  Chinese. ' '  The  human  race  had  always 
been  behaving  badly,  but  Mark  Twain  was  in  a  frame 
of  mind  to  perceive  it  now.  Was  he  the  founder  of  the 
great  school  of  muck-rakers  ?  He,  at  any  rate,  the  most 
sensitive,  the  most  humane  of  men,  rode  forth  to  the 
encounter  now,  the  champion  of  all  who,  like  himself, 
had  been  in  bondage.  It  is  impossible  to  ignore  this 
personal  aspect  of  his  passionate  sympathy  with  suffer- 
ing and  weakness  in  any  form,  whether  in  man  or  beast. 
In  these  later  years  it  was  the  spectacle  of  strength 
triumphing  over  weakness  that  alone  aroused  his  pas- 
sion or  even,  save  in  his  autobiographic  and  philosophic 
attempts,  induced  him  to  write.  One  remembers  those 
pages  in  "Following  the  Equator"  about  the  exploita- 
tion of  the  Kanakas.  Then  there  was  his  book  about 
King  Leopold  and  the  Congo,  and  "The  Czar's  Solilo- 
quy," and  "A  Horse's  Tale,"  written  for  Mrs.  Fiske's 
propaganda  against  bull-fighting  in  Spain.  The  Dreyfus 
case  was  an  obsession  with  him.  Finally,  among  many 
other  writings  of  a  similar  tendency,  there  was  his 
"Joan  of  Arc,"  in  which  he  had  summed  up  a  life- 
time's rage  against  the  forces  in  society  that  array 
themselves  against  the  aspiring  spirit.  Joan  of  Arc  has 
always  been  a  favorite  theme  with  old  men,  old  men 
who  have  dreamed  of  the  heroic  life  perhaps,  without 


Mustered  Out  257 

ever  attaining  it :  the  sharp  realism  of  Anatole  France 's 
biography,  which  so  infuriated  Mark  Twain,  was,  if 
he  had  known  it,  the  prerogative  of  a  veteran  who, 
equally  as  the  defender  of  Dreyfus,  the  comrade  of 
Juares  and  the  volunteer  of  1914,  has  proved  that 
scepticism  and  courage  are  capable  of  a  superb  rapport. 
Mark  Twain  had  not  been  able  to  rise  to  that  level,  and 
the  sentimentality  of  his  own  study  of  Joan  of  Arc 
shows  it.  In  his  animus  against  the  judges  of  Joan  one 
perceives,  however,  a  savage  and  despairing  defense  of 
the  misprized  poet,  the  betrayed  hero,  in  himself. 

The  outstanding  fact  about  this  later  effort  of  Mark 
Twain's  is  that  his  energy  is  concentrated  almost  exclu- 
sively in  attacks  of  one  kind  or  another.  His  mind, 
whether  for  good  or  ill,  has  become  thoroughly  destruc- 
tive. He  is  consumed  by  a  will  to  attack,  a  will  to 
abolish,  a  will  to  destroy :  ' '  sometimes, ' '  he  had  writ- 
ten, a  few  years  earlier,  "my  feelings  are  so  hot  that! 
I  have  to  take  the  pen  and  put  them  out  on  paper  to  | 
keep  them  from  setting  me  afire  inside."  He  who  had 
become  definitely  a  pessimist,  we  are  told,  at  forty-eight, 
in  the  hour  of  his  great  prosperity,  was  possessed  now 
with  a  rage  for  destruction.  Who  can  doubt  that  this 
was  pathological  ?  He  was  so  promiscuous  in  his  attacks ! 
Had  he  not,  as  early  as  1881,  assailed  even  the  postage 
rates;  had  he  not  been  thrown  into  a  fury  by  an  order 
from  the  Post  Office  Department  on  the  superscription 
of  envelopes  ?  There  were  whole  days,  one  is  told,  when 
he  locked  himself  up  in  his  rooms  and  refused  to  see 
his  secretary,  when  he  was  like  a  raging  animal  con- 
sumed with  a  blind  and  terrible  passion  of  despair: 
we  can  hear  his  leonine  roars  even  in  the  gentle  pages 
of  his  biographer.  Mr.  Paine  tells  how  he  turned  upon 
him  one  day  and  said  fiercely:  "Anybody  that  knows 
anything  knows  that  there  was  not  a  single  life  that 
was  ever  lived  that  was  worth  living";  and  again:  "I 
have  been  thinking  it  out — if  I  live  two  years  more  I 


258     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

•will  put  an  end  to  it  all.  I  will  kill  myself. ' '  "Was  that 
a  pose,  as  Mr.  Howells  says  ?  Was  it  a  mere  humorous 
fancy,  that  "plan"  for  exterminating  the  human  race 
by  withdrawing  all  the  oxygen  from  the  earth  for  two 
minutes?  Was  it  a  mere  impersonal  sympathy  for 
mankind,  that  perpetual  search  for  means  of  easement 
and  alleviation,  that  obsessed  interest  in  Christian 
Science,  in  therapeutics?  Was  it  not  all,  in  that  sound 
and  healthy  frame,  the  index  of  a  soul  that  was  mortally 
sick?  Mark  Twain's  attack  upon  the  failure  of  human 
life  was  merely  a  rationalization  of  the  failure  in  him- 
self. 

And  this  failure  was  the  failure  of  the  artist  in  him. 

Glance  back  thirty  years;  hear  what  he  writes  to 
Mr.  Howells  from  Italy  in  1878:  "I  wish  I  could  give 
those  sharp  satires  on  European  life  which  you  mention, 
but  of  course  a  man  can't  write  successful  satire  except 
he  be  in  a  calm,  judicial  good-humor;  whereas  I  hate 
travel,  and  I  hate  hotels,  and  I  hate  the  opera,  and  I 
hate  the  old  masters.  In  truth,  I  don't  ever  seem  to  be 
in  a  good  enough  humor  with  anything  to  satirize  it. 
No,  I  want  to  stand  up  before  it  and  curse  it  and  foam 
at  the  mouth,  or  take  a  club  and  pound  it  to  rags  and 
pulp.  I  have  got  in  two  or  three  chapters  about  Wag- 
ner's operas,  and  managed  to  do  it  without  showing 
temper,  but  the  strain  of  another  such  effort  would 
burst  me."  That  is  what  had  become  of  the  satirist, 
that  is  what  had  become  of  the  artist,  thirty  years  be- 
fore !  He,  the  unconscious  sycophant  of  the  crass  mate- 
rialism of  the  Gilded  Age,  who  had,  in  "The  Innocents 
Abroad,"  poured  ignorant  scorn  upon  so  many  of  the 
sublime  creations  of  the  human  spirit,  he,  the  playboy, 
the  comrade  and  emulator  of  magnates  and  wire-pullers, 
had  begun  even  then  to  pay  with  an  impotent  fury  for 
having  transgressed  his  own  instincts  unawares.  A  born 
artist  ridiculing  art,  a  born  artist  hating  art,  a  born 
artist  destroying  art — there  we  have  the  natural  evolu- 


Mustered  Out  259 

tion  of  a  man  who,  in  the  end,  wishes  to  destroy  himself 
and  the  world.  How  angrily  suspicious  he  is,  even  thus 
early,  of  all  esthetic  pretensions !  What  a  fierce  grudge 
he  has  against  those  who  lay  claim  to  a  certain  affection 
for  the  perverse  mysteries  of  high  art!  They  want  to 
get  into  the  dress  circle,  he  says,  by  a  lie;  that's  what 
they're  after!  The  " Slave  Ship,"  for  all  Ruskin's  fine 
phrases,  reminds  him  of  a  cat  having  a  fit  in  a  platter 
of  tomatoes.  Etcetera,  etcetera.  Here  we  have  the 
familiar  figure  of  the  peasant  who  imagines  a  woman 
must  be  a  prostitute  because  she  wears  a  low-cut  dress. 
But  the  peasant  spits  on  the  ground  and  walks  on. 
Mark  Twain  cannot  take  it  so  lightly :  that  low-cut  dress 
is  a  red  rag  to  him ;  he  foams  and  stamps  wherever  he 
sees  it.  Is  it  not  evident  that  he  is  the  prey  of  some 
appalling  repression?  It  is  not  in  the  nature  of  man 
to  desire  a  club  so  that  he  can  pound  works  of  art  into 
rags  and  pulp  unless  they  are  the  symbols  of  something 
his  whole  soul  unconsciously  desires  to  create  and  has 
been  prevented  from  creating.  Do  we  ask,  then,  why 
Mark  Twain  "detested"  novels?  It  was  because  he  had 
been  able  to  produce  only  one  himself,  and  that  a 
failure. 

We  can  understand  now  that  intense  will-wof-to- 
believe  in  the  creative  life  which  Mark  Twain  revealed 
in  his  later  writings.  "Man  originates  nothing,  not 
even  a  thought.  .  .  .  Shakespeare  could  not  create.  He 
was  a  machine,  and  machines  do  not  create."  Is  it 
possible  to  mistake  the  animus  in  that?  Mark  Twain 
was  an  ardent  Baconian:  in  that  faith,  he  said,  "I  find 
comfort,  solace,  peace  and  never-failing  joy."  I  will 
say  nothing  of  the  complete  lack  of  intuition  concerning 
the  psychology  of  the  artist  revealed  in  his  pamphlet, 
"Is  Shakespeare  Dead?"  It  is  astonishing  that  any 
writer  could  have  composed  this,  that  any  one  but  a 
retired  business  man  or  a  lawyer  infatuated  with  ratio- 
cination could  have  so  misapprehended  the  nature  and 


260    The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

the  processes  of  the  poetic  mind.  But  Mark  Twain  does 
not  write  like  a  credulous  business  man,  indulging  his 
hobby;  he  does  not  even  write  like  a  lawyer,  feverishly 
checking  off  the  proofs  of  that  intoxicating  evidence: 
he  is  defiant,  he  exults  in  the  triumph  of  his  own  certi- 
tude, he  stamps  on  Shakespeare,  he  insults  him,  he 
delights  in  pouring  vulgar  scorn  upon  that  ingenuous 
bust  in  Stratford  Church,  with  its  "deep,  deep,  deep, 
subtle,  subtle,  subtle  expression  of  a  bladder."  And 
why?  Because  the  evidence  permits  him  to  believe  that 
Shakespeare  was  an  ignorant  yokel.  Bacon  was  the 
man,  Bacon  knew  everything,  Bacon  was  a  lawyer — see 
what  Macaulay  says !  Macaulay,  heaven  bless  us  all ! — 
therefore,  Bacon  wrote  the  plays.  Is  this  Mark  Twain 
speaking,  the  author  of  the  sublime  illiteracies  of 
"Huckleberry  Finn,"  who  had  been  himself  most  the 
artist  when  he  was  least  the  sophisticated  citizen  ?  It  is, 
and  he  is  speaking  in  character.  He  who  asserted  that 
man  is  a  chameleon  and  is  nothing  but  what  his  training 
makes  him  had  long  lost  the  intuition  of  the  poet  and 
believed  perforce  that  without  Bacon's  training  those 
plays  could  not  have  been  written.  But  would  he  have 
stamped  with  such  a  savage  joy  upon  that  yokel  Shake- 
speare if  the  fact,  as  he  imagined,  that  man  creates 
nothing  had  not  had  for  him  a  tragic,  however  uncon- 
scious, significance?  One  can  hardly  doubt  that  when 
one  considers  that  Mark  Twain  was  never  able  to  follow 
the  Bacon  ciphers,  when  one  considers  the  emotional 
prepossession  revealed  in  his  own  statement  that  he 
accepted  those  ciphers  mainly  on  faith. 

How  simple  it  becomes  now,  the  unraveling  of  that 
mournful  philosophy  of  his,  that  drab  mass  of  crude 
speculation  of  which  he  said  so  confidently  that  it  was 
"like  the  sky — you  can't  break  through  anywhere." 
How  much  it  meant  to  him,  the  thought  that  man  is  a 
mere  machine,  an  irresponsible  puppet,  entitled  to  no 
demerit  for  what  he  has  failed  to  do !  "  Dahomey, ' '  he 


Mustered  Out  261 

says,  somewhere,  "could  not  find  an  Edison  out;  in 
Dahomey  an  Edison  could  not  find  himself  out.  Broadly 
speaking,  genius  is  not  born  with  sight  but  blind;  and 
it  is  not  itself  that  opens  its  eyes,  but  the  subtle  influ- 
ences of  a  myriad  of  stimulating  exterior  circum- 
stances." "What  a  comment,  side  by  side  with  Mark 
Twain's  life,  upon  Mr.  Howells's  statement  that  the 
world  in  which  he  ' '  came  into  his  intellectual  conscious- 
ness" was  "large  and  free  and  safe" — large,  for  the 
satirist,  with  Mrs.  Clemens,  free  with  Mr.  Howells 
himself,  and  safe  with  H.  H.  Rogers !  "If  Shakespeare 
had  been  born  and  bred  on  a  barren  and  unvisited  rock 
in  the  ocean  his  mighty  intellect  would  have  had  no 
outside  material  to  work  with,  and  could  have  invented 
none;  and  no  outside  influences,  teachings,  moldings, 
persuasions,  inspirations  of  a  valuable  sort,  and  could 
have  invented  none;  and  so  Shakespeare  would  have 
produced  nothing.  In  Turkey  he  would  have  produced 
something — something  up  to  the  highest  limit  of  Turkish 
influences,  associations  and  training.  In  France  he 
would  have  produced  something  better — something  up 
to  the  highest  limit  of  the  French  influences  and  train- 
ing". .  .  .  Mark  Twain  fails  to  mention  what  would 
have  happened  to  Shakespeare  if  he  had  been  born  in 
America.  He  merely  adds,  but  it  is  enough:  "You  and 
I  are  but  sewing-machines.  We  must  turn  out  what  we 
can;  we  must  do  our  endeavor  and  care  nothing  at  all 
when  the  unthinking  reproach  us  for  not  turning  out 
Gobelins."  There  we  have  his  half -conscious  verdict 
on  the  destiny  of  the  artist  in  a  society  as  "large  and 
free  and  safe"  as  that  of  the  Gilded  Age. 

Yes,  the  tragic  thing  about  an  environment  as  coercive 
as  ours  is  that  we  are  obliged  to  endow  it  with  the 
majesty  of  destiny  itself  in  order  to  save  our  own  faces! 
We  dwell  on  the  conditions  that  hamper  us,  destroy  us, 
we  embrace  them  with  an  amor  fati,  to  escape  from  the 
contemplation  of  our  own  destruction.  "Outside  influ- 


262     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

ences,  outside  circumstances,  wiqd  the  man  and  regu- 
late  him.  Left  to  himself,  he  wouldn't  get  regulated 
at  all,  and  the  sort  of  time  he  would  keep  would  not 
be_valuable. "  There  is  the  complete  philosophy  of  the 
moral  slave  who  nut  only  has  no  autonomy  but  wishes 
to  nave  none,  who,  in  fact,  finds  all  his  comfort  in  hav- 
ing none,  and  delights  in  denying  the  possibility  of 
independence  just__because  he  does  not  possess  "It~  him- 
self. The  pragmatists  have  escaped  this  net  in  their 
own  interestingly  temperamental  fashion,  like  flying- 
fish,  by  jumping  over  it.  It  remains,  nevertheless,  the 
characteristic  philosophy  of  Americans  who  have  a  deep 
emotional  stake  in  the  human  situation;  and  one  might 
almost  say  that  it  honors  Mark  Twain.  We  only  per- 
ceive, we  are  only  mortified  by  the  slavery  of  men,  when 
nature  has  endowed  us  with  the  true  hunger  and  thirst 
for  freedom. 

Who  can  doubt,  indeed,  that  it  was  the  very  greatness 
of  his  potential  force,  the  strength  of  his  instinctive 
preferences,  that  confirmed  in  Mark  Twain  his  inborn 
Calvinistic.  will-to -despise  human  nature,  that  fixed  in 

Trim  the  obsession  of  the  miscarriage  of  the  human 
spirit?  If  the  great  artist  is  the  freest  man,  if  the  true 
creative  life  is,  in  fact,  the  embodiment  of  "free  will," 
then  it  is  only  he  that  is  born  for  greatness  who  can 
feel,  as  Mark  Twain  felt,  that  the  universe  is  leagued 
against  him.  The  common  man  has  no  sense  of  having 
surrendered  his  will :  he  regards  it  as  a  mere  pretension 
of  the  philosophers  that  man  has  a  will  to  surrender. 

•  He  eats,  drinks  and  continues  to  be  merry  or  morose 
regardless  of  his  moral  destiny :  to  possess  no  principle 
of  growth,  no  spiritual  backbone  is,  indeed,  his  greatest 
advantage  in  a  world  where  success  is  the  reward  of 
accommodation.  It  is  nothing  to  him  that  man  is  a 
" chameleon"  who  "by  the  law  of  his  nature  takes  the 
color  of  his  place  of  resort " ;  it  is  nothing  to  him 
whether  or  not,  as  Mark  Twain  said;  the  first  command 


Mustered  Out  263 

the  Deity  issued  to  a  human  being  on  this  planet  was 
"Be  weak,  be  water,  be  characterless,  be  cheaply  per- 
suadable," knowing  that  Adam  would  never  be  able 
to  disobey.  It  is  nothing  to  him,  or  rather  it  is  much: 
for  it  is  by  this  means  that  he  wins  his  worldly  prestige. 
How  well,  for  that  matter,  it  served  the  prevailing  self 
in  Mark  Twain!  "From  the  cradle  to  the  grave,  during 
all  his  waking  hours,  the  human  being  is  under  train- 
ing. ...  It  is  his  human  environment  wKTch~mfluences 
his  mind  and  his  feelings,  furnishes  him  his  ideals,  and 
sets  him  on  his  road  and  keeps  him  in  it.  If  he  leave 
that  road  he  will  find  himself  shunned  by  the  people 
whom  he  most  loves  and  esteems,  and  whose  approval  he 
most  values.  .  .  .  The  influences  about  him  create  his 
preferences,  his  aversions,  his  politics,  his  tastes,  his 
morals,  his  religion.  He  creates  none  .of  these  things 
for  himself."  Poor  Mark  Twain!  That  is  the  way  of 
common  flesh.  But  only  the  great  spirit  so  fully  appre- 
hends the  tragedy  of  it. 

Nothing,  consequently,  could  be  more  pathetic  than 
the  picture  Mark  Twain  draws,  in  "What  Is  Man?" 
and  in  his  later  memoranda,  of  the  human  mind.  It  is 
really  his  own  mind  he  is  describing,  and  one  cannot 
imagine  anything  more  unlike  the  mind  of  the  mature 
artist,  which  is  all  of  a  single  flood,  all  poise,  all  natural 
control.  "You  cannot  keep  your  mind  from  wandering, 
if  it  wants  to;  it  is  master,  not  you.  .  .  .  The  mind 
carries  on  thought  on  its  own  hook.  .  .  .  "We  are  auto- 
matic machines  which  act  unconsciously.  From  morn- 
ing till  sleeping-time,  all  day  long.  All  day  long  our 
machinery  is  doing  things  from  habit  and  instinct,  and 
without  requiring  any  help  or  attention  from  our  poor 
little  7-by-9  thinking  apparatus".  .  .  .  Man  "has  habits, 
and  his  habils_will  ^act  Jbefqre  his  thinking  apparatus 
can  get  a  chance  to  exert  its  powers."  Mark  Twain 
cannot  even  conceive  of  the  individual  reacting,  as  the 
mature  man,  as  the  artist  preeminently,  does,  upon  his 


264     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

instinctive  life  and  controlling  it  for  his  own  ends.  He 
shows  us  the  works  of  his  mental  machine  "racing 
along  from  subject  to  subject — a  drifting  panorama  of 
ever-changing,  ever-dissolving  views  manufactured  by 
my  mind  without  any  help  from  me — why,  it  would 
take  me  twd  hours  to  merely  name  the  multitude  of  things 
my  mind  tallied  .off  and  photographed  in  fifteen  min- 
utes." The  mind? — man  "has  no  control  over  it^it 

does  as  it  pleases. It •_ will  take  up  a  subject  in  spite 

of  him;  it  will  stick  to  it  in  spite  of  him;  it  will  throw 
it  aside  in  spite  of  him.  It  is  entirely  independent  of 
him."  Does  he  call  himself  a  machine?  He  might 
better  have  said  a  merry-go-round,  without  the  rhythm 
of  a  merry-go-round.  Mark  Twain  reveals  himself  in 
old  age  as  a  prey  to  all  manner  of  tumbling,  chaotic 
obsessions;  his  mind  rings  with  rhymes  he  cannot  ban- 
ish, sticks  and  stumbles  over  chess-problems  he  has  no 
desire  to  solve:  "it  wouldn't  listen;  it  played  right 
along.  It  wore  me  out  and  I  got  up  haggard  and 
wretched  in  the  morning."  A  swarming  mass  of  dis- 
sociated fragments  of  personality,  an  utterly  disinte- 
grated spirit,  a  spirit  that  has  lost,  that  has  never 
possessed,  the  principle  of  its  own  growth.  Always,  in 
these  speculations,  however,  we  find  two  major  per- 
sonalities at  war  with  each  other.  One  is  the  refractory 
self  that  wants  to  publish  the  book  regardless  of  conse- 
quences; the  other  is  the  "insolent  absolute  Monarch 
inside  of  a  man  who  is  the  man's  master"  and  who,, 
forbids  it.  The  eternal  conflict  of  Huckleberry  Finn  1 
and  Aunt  Polly  playing  itself  out  to  the  end  in  the  J 
theater  of  Mark  Twain's  soul! 

The  interpretation  of  dreams  is  a  very  perilous  enter- 
prise: contemporary  psychology  hardly  permits  us  to 
venture  into  it  with  absolute  assurance.  And  yet  we 
feel  that  without  doubt  our  unconscious  selves  express 
through  this  distorting  medium  their  hidden  desires  and 
fears.  "I  generally  enjoy  my  dreams,"  Mark  Twain 


Mustered  Out  265 

once  told  Mr.  Paine,  "but  not  those  three,  and  they 
are  the  ones  I  have  oftenest."  He  wrote  out  these 
"three  recurrent  dreams"  in  a  memorandum:  one  of 
them  is  long  and,  to  me  at  least,  without  obvious  sig- 
nificance, but  one  cannot  fail  to  see  in  the  other  two  a 
singular  corroboration  of  the  view  of  Mark  Twain's 
life  that  has  been  unfolded  in  these  pages. 

"There  is  never  a  month  passes,"  he  wrote,  "that  I 
do  not  dream  of  being  in  reduced  circumstances,  and 
obliged  to  go  back  to  the  river  to  earn  a  living.  It  is 
never  a  pleasant  dream,  either.  I  love  to  think  about 
those  days;  but  there's  always  something  sickening 
about  the  thought  that  I  have  been  obliged  to  go  back 
to  them;  and  usually  in  my  dream  I  am  just  about  to 
start  into  a  black  shadow  without  being  able  to  tell 
whether  it  is  Selma  Bluff,  or  Hat  Island,  or  only  a 
black  wall  of  night. 

"Another  dream  that  I  have  of  that  kind  is  being 
compelled  to  go  back  to  the  lecture  platform.  I  hate 
that  dream  worse  than  the  other.  In  it  I  am  always 
getting  up  before  an  audience  with  nothing  to  say, 
trying  to  be  funny ;  trying  to  make  the  audience  laugh, 
realizing  that  I  am  only  making  silly  jokes.  Then  the 
audience  realizes  it,  and  pretty  soon  they  commence  to 
get  up  and  leave.  That  dream  always  ends  by  my 
standing  there  in  the  semi-darkness  talking  to  an  empty 
house. ' ' 

I  leave  my  readers  to  expound  these  dreams  according 
to  the  formulas  that  please  them  best.  I  wish  to  note 
only  two  or  three  points.  Mark  Twain  is  obsessed  with 
the  idea  of  going  back  to  the  river:  "I  love  to  think 
about  those  days."  But  there  is  something  sickening 
in  the  thought  of  returning  to  them,  too,  and  that  is 
because  of  the  "black  shadow,"  the  "black  wall  of 
night,"  into  which  he,  the  pilot,  sees  himself  inevitably 
steering.  That  is  a  precise  image  of  his  life ;  the  second 
dream  is  its  natural  complement.  On  the  lecture  plat- 


266     The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain 

form  his  prevailing  self  had  ' '  revelled ' '  in  its  triumphs, 
and,  he  says,  ' '  I  hate  that  dream  worse  than  the  other. ' ' 
Had  he  ever  wished  to  be  a  humorist?  He  is  always 
"trying  to  make  the  audience  laugh";  the  horror  of  it 
is  that  he  has  lost,  in  his  nightmare,  the  approval  for 
which  he  had  made  his  great  surrender. 

Turn,  again,  to  the  last  pages  in  Mr.  Paine 's  biog- 
raphy, to  the  moment  when  he  lay  breathing  out  his 
life  in  the  cabin  of  that  little  Bermuda  packet: 

"Two  dreams  beset  him  in  his  momentary  slumber — 
one  of  a  play  in  which  the  title-role  of  the  general  man- 
ager was  always  unfilled.  He  spoke  of  this  now  and 
then  when  it  had  passed,  and  it  seemed  to  amuse  him. 
The  other  was  a  discomfort:  a  college  assembly  was 
attempting  to  confer  upon  him  some  degree  which  he 
did  not  want.  Once,  half  roused,  he  looked  at  me 
searchingly  and  asked:  'Isn't  there  something  I  can 
resign  and  be  out  of  all  this?  They  keep  trying  to 
confer  that  degree  upon  me  and  I  don't  want  it.'  Then, 
realizing,  he  said:  'I  am  like  a  bird  in  a  cage:  always 
expecting  to  get  out,  and  always  beaten  back  by  the 
wires.'  ' 

No,  Mark  Twain's  seventieth  birthday  had  not  re- 
leased him:  it  would  have  had  to  release  him  from 
himself !  It  cut  away  the  cords  that  bound  him ;  but 
the  tree  was  not  flexible  any  more,  it  was  old  and  rigid, 
fixed  for  good  and  all ;  it  could  not  redress  the  balance. 
In  one  pathetic  excess  alone  the  artist  blossomed:  that 
costume  of  white  flannels,  the  temerity  of  which  so 
shocked  Mr.  Ho  wells  in  Washington.  "I  should  like," 
said  Mark  Twain,  "to  dress  in  a  loose  and  flowing  cos- 
tume made  all  of  silks  and  velvets  resplendent  with 
stunning  dyes.  So  would  every  man  I  have  ever  known ; 
but  none  of  us  dares  to  venture  it."  There  speaks  the 
born  artist,  the  starved  artist  who  for  forty  years  has 
had  to  pretend  that  he  was  a  business  man,  the  born 
artist  who  has  always  wanted  to  be  "original"  in  his 


Mustered  Out  267 

dress  and  has  had  to  submit  to  a  feverish  censorship 
even  over  his  neckties — the  artist  who,  longing  to  look 
like  an  orchid,  has  the  courage  at  last  and  at  least  to 
emulate  the  modest  lily! 

And  so  we  see  Mark  Twain,  with  his  "dry  and  dusty" 
heart,  "washing  about  on  a  forlorn  sea  of  banquets  and 
speech-making,"  the  saddest,  the  most  ironical  figure 
in  all  the  history  of  this  Western  continent.  The  king, 
the  conquering  hero,  the  darling  of  the  masses,  praised 
and  adored  by  all,  he  is  unable  even  to  reach  the  cynic 's 
paradise,  that  vitriolic  sphere  which  has,  after  all,  a 
serenity  of  its  own.  The  playboy  to  the  end,  divided 
between  rage  and  pity,  cheerful  in  his  self-contempt, 
an  illusionist  in  the  midst  of  his  disillusion,  he  is  the 
symbol  of  the  creative  life  in  a  country  where  "by  the 
goodness  of  God,  we  have  those  three  unspeakably 
precious  things:  freedom  of  speech,  freedom  of  con- 
science, and  the  prudence  never  to  practise  either  of 
them."  He  is  the  typical  American,  people  have  said: 
let  heaven  draw  its  own  conclusions.  As  for  ourselves, 
we  are  permitted  to  think  otherwise.  He  was  the 
supreme  victim  of  an  epoch  in  American  history,  an 
epoch  that  has  closed.  Has  the  American  writer  of 
to-day  the  same  excuse  for  missing  his  vocation?  "He 
must  be  very  dogmatic  or  unimaginative,"  says  John 
Eglinton,  with  a  prophetic  note  that  has  ceased  to  be 
prophetic,  "who  would  affirm  that  man  will  never 
weary  of  the  whole  system  of  things  which  reigns  at 
present.  .  .  .  We  never  know  how  near  we  are  to  the 
end  of  any  phase  of  our  experience,  and  often  when  its 
seeming  stability  begins  to  pall  upon  us,  it  is  a  sign 
that  things  are  about  to  take  a  new  turn."  Eead, 
writers  of  America,  the  driven,  disenchanted,  anxious 
faces  of  your  sensitive  countrymen;  remember  the 
splendid  parts  your  confreres  have  played  in  the  human 
drama  of  other  times  and  other  peoples,  and  ask  your- 
selves whether  the  hour  has  not  come  to  put  away  child- 
ish things  and  walk  the  stage  as  poets  do. 


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